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PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN 
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 



A DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OE THE DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND 

LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE 

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



(DEPARTMENT OF philosophy) 



BY 

CHARLES EDGAR WITTER 



CHICAGO 

1913 



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Gil 
The Univ.. 

I / 1919 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

Pragmatism is "a new name for old ways of thinking" — some of the 
old ways. Its mission and its merit consist, then, not in introducing an 
entirely novel standpoint, but in helping to disentangle the functional, 
dynamic viewpoint from the remnants of rationalism or intellectualism 
contained in most philosophical systems, whether they be of the idealistic 
or the materialistic order. 

Pragmatism was practically influential long before it was recognized 
as a mode of philosophy. It was operative in ethical and educational 
theory. A decade ago Dewey rendered a service in the critical study of 
logic by showing that there were functional elements in Lotze. Addison 
W. Moore made a similarly valuable contribution in his comparison of 
the representational and functional aspects of Locke's Essay — a con- 
tribution that was immediately reviewed by Schiller. Doubtless this 
contrast between a practical conception of the real work of thought as 
one of the factors in human development and the copy view of ideas 
might be found in any one of the historic philosophers, indeed might be 
traced far back into the roots of historic development in the Greek 
thinkers. 

The undertaking to study Kant's system from the pragmatic stand- 
point was made from several considerations. Kant himself was the 
clearing-house for a vast amount of antecedent and contemporary 
thought. His very effort to mediate between a raw empiricism and the 
old scholastic dogmatism indicated that he appreciated the difficulties in 
either standpoint and wished to find a way out. Technically he remained 
a rationalist but he was the initiator of an epoch that issues legitimately 
in the modern dynamic attitude toward truth and reality. Kant points 
two ways — toward idealism and toward pragmatism. It was the 
" transcendental" in his system that long obscured the functional and 
led his followers off on the wrong path. The influence and the interpre- 
tation of that "transcendental" are today not far from the firing-line of 
philosophical debate and advance. 

The pragmatic movement, moreover, is constantly brought into 
comparison and relation to Kant whether we will or no. The very terms 
"practical reason," "theoretical reason," and the contrast between them 
are his invention. The "postulates of the practical reason" is a phrase 
so strikingly similar, even in sound, to the principles of pragmatic 



IV PREFACE 

inquiry that it is on the lips of pragmatic thinkers constantly. It 
arouses the feeling, even without accurate analysis, that Kant realized, 
after all, the true nature of thinking as an active process growing out of 
life itself. Yet it has been assumed by many that Kant's system stands 
for the fixed and the unmodifiable in thought and reality. A clear 
exposition of his functional leading, if it be contained in his work, should 
be of aid not only to pragmatism in giving it historic dignity, but also to 
a true estimate of Kant's place in the development of human thought 
and life. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

i. Introduction i 

2. Space and Time 7 

3. Tee Mind's Construction of Nature 16 

4. The Schematism of the Categories 25 

5. The Regulative Use of Reason — the Antinomies . . . . 31 

6. The Ideal of Reason 39 

7. Kant's Teleology versus Mechanical Causality .... 50 

8. Postulates of Practical Reason for the Moral and Religious 

Life 57 

9. Things-in-Themselves 65 

10. Bibliography 74 



INTRODUCTION 

Kant's criticism was the center from which may be traced, roughly 
speaking, three lines of development. One main line took its rise from 
Kant's teaching regarding the a priori functions of the theoretical reason. 
This line culminates in Hegel and the neo-Hegelians. Its essence 
consists in abstracting Kant's thought-forms and making them absolute; 
in explaining content as determined by form; in affirming a logical 
reality higher than that appearing in the world of experience. A second 
main line may be traced to Kant's doctrine of the primacy of the practical 
reason. This movement is represented by Fichte and Schopenhauer 
who developed two aspects of Kant's conception of will. For Kant, 
will seems to be a complex of two factors: first, inclination or desire, 
and secondly, reason as setting up ideals and putting them into action. 
A double line of voluntarism appears in Fichte's connection with the 
second of these factors, an aspect of his thought not covered by his 
idealism, and in Schopenhauer's attachment to the first factor. 
Schopenhauer, taking his point of departure in the Kantian distinction 
between "thing-in-itself" and "appearance" — a distinction which 
absolute idealism in its own way sought to obliterate — endeavored to 
find in his own soul life a piece of reality given, existing in the form in 
which we know it. From this piece of reality Schopenhauer thought we 
could infer the whole reality by analogy. He would use the insight won 
in a psychological way as a "regulative principle," to adopt Kant's 
phraseology. For this principle the practical reason, not the theoretical, 
is the source. The conflict between intellectualism and voluntarism is 
solved in Schopenhauer by subsuming under will all psychical occur- 
rences, but the rationalistic element in his thinking asserts itself in his 
adherence to a unity as the ultimate ground — a unity still conceived in 
an abstract-logical sense. The third main line of development boasting 
its lineage from Kant is empiricism. Passing by those problems upon 
which Kant placed such great worth, and fortifying itself upon that 
feature of the Kantian thought which affirmed that knowledge is limited 
to the empirical world, empiricism has ignored the treatment of the 
"Transcendental Aesthetic" and the "Transcendental Analytic" and 
has turned back gladly to Hume. 

Pragmatism enters the arena with a clear title of its own. Reacting 
strongly against the absolutism of the first main line of development, it 



2 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

assumes the role of a better empiricism. Empiricism itself had shown a 
strongly marked intellectualistic disposition, failing utterly to do justice 
to the organism's reaction upon its environment. Pragmatism trans- 
plants empiricism to the region of voluntarism and is thus in better 
position to overcome the opposition between Kant's rationalism and his 
empiricism than was any movement of thought that has yet appeared 
since the epoch of criticism itself. It may safely be affirmed that in 
pragmatism philosophic thought moves in the direction from Hegel 
back to Kant. For while the faithful follower of Hegel may assert that 
his genesis of the categories is more pragmatic than Kant's given, fixed 
categories, it is all too evident that in the end this supposed genesis lacks 
any genuine quality. As Sturt says, "A changeless development is not 
merely a difficult conception; it is downright nonsense." 1 All of the 
apparent development in Hegel and the neo-Hegelians is merely the 
phenomenal unfolding of the timeless absolute idea, which is the sole 
reality. For pragmatic purposes thought must move back to the 
vantage-ground of criticism, to gain a fresh start in the study of the 
properly constructive character of mental activity, to see the function 
of knowledge as one of the factors in reality. It cannot be committed 
to a plan given and finished in advance. Pragmatism is deflected at 
times from this straight backward path, in tracing its historic origins, 
not only by its antipathy to the rationalistic elements latent in criticism 
itself, but also by its affinity for the results of modern psychology which 
were either unknown to Kant or were at no time in the focus of his 
attention. 

If it can be shown that the salient features of the pragmatic attitude 
are contained either explicitly or implicitly in Kant's thinking, several 
distinct points will be gained for the pragmatic movement and, possibly, 
for the interests of real intellectual progress. First, it may appear that 
the critical movement of thought was not a mere waste, to say the least; 
that we do not, as James has suggested, have to short-circuit the great 
German thinker, though it may result that we have short-circuited some 
of the idealistic systems that succeeded him. Secondly, it may be seen 
that pragmatism is not a mere by-path from the main road of philosophic 
development, but preserves the line of historic continuity and sequence. 
Thirdly, by finding and accrediting itself in the great thinker who stands 
historically as the gateway to modern thought, pragmatism may at least 
challenge the right of absolute idealism to usurp the leadership over the 
philosophical world, to claim for speculative philosophy the sole key to 

1 Idola Theatri, p. 186. 



INTRODUCTION 3 

reality and the meaning of things. Fourthly, in revealing the arrogance 
of pure intellectualism generally, it may serve to show the weakness of 
that form of scientific investigation — so called — that was provoked in 
opposition to speculative systems — the craving for mere blind facts — 
and may lead thought back to the vantage-ground of modesty with 
which the effort of criticism set forth originally. The oft-repeated cry, 
"Back to Kant," may be found to have vital significance. 

That there are close resemblances between pragmatism and 
Kantianism is apparent even to the casual reader. As George A. Coe 
remarks, "From the historical side pragmatism appears as a new pre- 
sentation of empiricism, or a new development of the Kantian doctrine/ 
of the primacy of the practical reason as against the theoretical." 1 The 
most naive student, when he reads of the Will-to-Believe and of Kant's 
postulates of the practical reason is moved to exclaim, "How very 
modern this Kant is after all." The relation of pragmatism to criticism 
is forcefully suggested in Schiller's declaration that if Kant had been 
twenty years younger when the full significance of postulating dawned . 
upon him he would have rewritten his great work from the avowedly 
pragmatic standpoint. How close or how loose some of these intimated 
comparisons and relationships are we hope to discover as we proceed. 

Historically, two systems of thought met in Kant — rationalism and 
empiricism. It is our conviction that throughout his thinking two systems 
or aspects are apparent — the transcendental and what we moderns 
designate as the functional or the pragmatic. In his "transcendental" 
we see the influence of inherited rationalistic assumptions from which 
he was unable wholly to escape; but when we come to examine his use 
of the transcendental — the practical application of it when it has any 
meaning — we come upon distinctly pragmatic tendencies. Kantianism, 
relieved of transcendentalism, yields virtually pragmatism. Kant stands 
with his face toward the modern, functional view of life and reality, even 
when he is unable to express himself to that effect in the letter of his 
terminology. 

It would, of course, be idle to ignore, at the outset, the too static 
character of his system. He antedates evolution and the biological 
approach to the problems of psychology and life. To be sure Paul 
Carus thinks that Kant — particularly the young Kant, the Kant of the 
first edition, the author of the Presumable Origin of Humanity, of the 
treatise, Upon the Different Races of Mankind, and of The General 
History and Theory of the Heavens — leaned strongly toward the evolution 

1 Methodist Review, 1908, p. 212. 



hypothesis; that he recognized "neither the stability of species nor any 
fixed limits between them," and that "he discusses the origin of the 
species of man in a way which would do honor to a follower of Darwin." 1 
But while the younger Kant, in his most scientific moods, may have had 
fitful foregleams of the evolution of species and of the survival of the 
fittest, there is, unfortunately, "no evolution in his categories" when he 
sets himself to his great work in the examination of knowledge. In 
common with the ancients who rightly held that ultimately the problems 
of science and metaphysics are identical, he wrongly considers his / 
concepts fixed and unalterable — "these and this exact number only." v 
Yet with all his dogmatic background and environment it may still be 
indicated that the epoch opened by him in the evolution of thought 
extends legitimately through all the one-sided systems that have 
attempted to complete his work and reaches our most modern dynamic 
conception of thought and life; that he was essentially pragmatic in his 
view of the nature of truth, the criterion of truth, and, possibly, the 
nature of reality. 

His rationalistic inheritance from the past appears in his separation 
of sense and understanding and in his retention of things-in- themselves. 
He practically accepts with Hume the isolated, relationless sense elements 
which require to be combined for knowledge. To be sure, after he has 
laboriously shown how these are combined by the forms and categories 
of the mind, he virtually repudiates them and proves that they could 
never have existed in the abstracted, relationless form in which he sets 
out with them. He seems, however, never to discover the full meaning 
of this truth. A deeper study of this important fact would have helped 
to square him completely with the modern functional viewpoint. The 
transcendental deduction assumes in its premises what it emphatically 
denies in its conclusion. To get unification he thinks we must introduce 
a transcendental element — spaceless and timeless; yet, having assumed 
in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" these atomistic entities, he turns 
around and rejects them in the "Transcendental Analytic." This 
would seem to imply that the desired unity may be attained without the 
transcendental element. Had this separation been less sharp in his 
mind to begin with, the thought implicit in his entire system might have 
reached explicit recognition, namely, that sense material has connections 
of its own, or otherwise speaking, that sense material standing by itself 
is a mere abstraction, an unwarrantable assumption. Kant and the 
objective idealists who followed him assumed that whatever is distin- 

1 Kant and Spencer, p. 42. 



INTRODUCTION 5 

guishable is separable. All idealistic systems need this assumption to 
make out a case, and when the assumption is exposed, their case tumbles. 
Their problem is how, out of a congeries of atoms, to get an experience, 
but as Dewey well says, "That red, or far and near, or hard and soft, or 
big and little involve a relation between organism and environment is 
no more an argument for idealism than is the fact that water involves 
a relation between oxygen and hydrogen. It is, however, an argument 
for the ultimately practical value of these distinctions — that they are 
differences made in what things would have been without organic behavior 
— differences made not by consciousness or mind, but by the organism 
as the active center of a system of activities." 1 Kant makes an artificial 
separation between his sense-impressions and his concepts which he says 
are pure. The real distinction between the two is functional and may 
vary with the situation. Kant seems to use it as an ontological dis- 
tinction hard and fast. Instead of taking the experience just as it 
presents itself — datum and meaning included — he first puts his sense- 
qualities and his concepts into tight compartments. This is not always 
the case, as we are endeavoring to point out, but in the "Aesthetic" 
especially he treats his a priori elements and his empirical elements as 
actual entities, existing in independence of each other, prior to their 
union by the transcendental forms. f All transcendentalists make the 
same mistake. Bradley, for instance, says that in our sensation of black 
certain relations of comparison and discrimination are constituents. 
He forgets that this is true only when we begin to ask questions about it. 
He says these relations are present transcendent ally, as did Kant. He 
substitutes the black of the discriminated experience as the situation 
from which we get our notion of what quality is and then equates the 
two experiences. That is, he takes a situation where datum and meaning 
have been developed, where the discriminated and related qualities are 
experienced in reflective analysis and throws this back into situations of 
the non-reflective sort. Sense content does not mean anything apart 
from relations of meaning, but, says Bradley, the sense content is not 
created by these relations of meaning, hence intellect can do nothing 
with it and we have contradiction. He does not realize that in making 
the distinction between the sense-elements and thought we have changed 
the character of the experience; that when experience is thus transformed 
we have experienced datum and experienced meaning. He overlooks 
the fact that in our actual experience there is no datum other than that 
of meaning. Just so /Kant takes a sense-impression, abstracts it from 

1 Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 66. 



its concrete situation, and makes a formal unity of it. He does the same 
with thought or with his concepts. 

Despite this separation on the part of Kant, however, there is a near 
approach to the pragmatic method in his three-fold synthesis of appre- 
hension, reproduction, and recognition. He moves away from crude 
realism and in the direction of functionalism in arguing that, instead of 
our cognition conforming to objects, objects must conform to our mode 
of cognition. At the very outset of the " Aesthetic" he lifts space and 
time out of the hands of every form of crude realism although he makes 
it rather easy for them to lapse into the arms of absolutism. Pragmatism 
takes one of its chief inspirations in breaking away from the representa- 
tional view of knowledge — the view that our scientific ideas are exact 
copies of external or trans-empirical realities. Kant would seem to be 
in harmony with this attitude in holding that the mind furnishes con- 
stituent factors — helps to build its own ideas of natural science. He 
differs from the pragmatist in abstracting sharply this work of the 
understanding in thus furnishing the relating factors. He sees that the 
mind contributes something to the determination of the object — so far 
pragmatic. He cannot grasp the full truth that the perception of the 
object is just one whole piece of experience. It was the false separation 
left between datum and meaning that offered the opening wedge for 
idealistic systems. Kant says or implies that all experience is not self- 
conscious but potentially self-conscious. This implies a set of relations 
not in experience, and just here we have the root of Bradley's puzzles, 
as has been indicated. From this spring T. H. Green's efforts to bring 
relations and sense-impressions together. Green identifies knowledge 
with all relationships and finds, therefore, that it is not derived from 
nature. Elsewhere Green uses knowledge as a mere temporal function. 
This confusion and error in his thought is plainly attributable to the 
influence of German idealism. As Sturt says, "Kant's influence led 
him to make an absolute separation between the synthetic consciousness 
and the empirical stream, and to say that the synthetic consciousness is 
changeless or out of time entirely." 1 He and all the absolutists use 
knowledge in the two senses. Knowledge as a temporal function is 
forgotten, its dynamic and purposeful implications are ignored, and 
hence the metaphysical riddles. 

1 Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 240. 



SPACE AND TIME 

In Kant's treatment, first of all, of space and time — the fundamental 
forms of or rather for perception — he has both a transcendental and a 
functional use. To experience things in space and time we must have a 
space and time into which to put them. Therefore they are not derived 
from experience but are preconditions. In the "Aesthetic" he says: 
" Time is not an empirical conception. Time is given a priori." 1 Yet he 
elsewhere remarks: "Time is nothing in abstraction from the conditions 
of sensible perception." 2 If he had stopped to ask himself the meaning 
of this functionalism, to analyze and elaborate the significance of this 
contradiction, he might have been led farther on the path of the instru- 
mental character of knowledge. Holding the mathematical viewpoint, 
he stresses the continuity aspect of these forms, failing to notice suffi- 
ciently that from the practical viewpoint they receive their content from 
discrete objects and events. Other expressions, however, are not 
wanting to contradict his notion of an intuition of an objective time as 
an infinite necessary continuum: "Time is nothing but the form of our 
own internal intuition. Take away the peculiar condition of our sen- 
sibility, and the idea of time vanishes, because it is not inherent in the 
objects, but in the subject only that perceives them." 3 If the latter 
statement is true, accepting for the moment its subjectivistic character- 
ization, we scarcely need the subsequent debate in the "Antinomies" as 
to our ability to imagine time either as ending or as going on forever. 
For our purposes we want neither to go to the end of time nor to divide 
it up into infinite atoms. Our conception of time is adequate for all the 
purposes to which we need to put it and this is implied in the outcome of 
Kant's discussion of this antinomy, namely, that only the one use of it, 
the functional, phenomenal, will ever benefit us. " What it does deter- 
mine is the relation of ideas in our own inner state." 4 Bawden well 
says: "Antinomies result from the attempt to conceive empty space and 
time apart from the concrete experience where they have meaning. We 
cannot perceive empty space and time, but only objects and events. 
Pure space and time are artifacts like ' the average child ' or ' the economic 
man.'" 5 Kant, in his summation of this matter, swings back to his 

1 Watson, Selections, p. 30. 

2 Ibid., p. 34. 3 Ibid., p. 35. 4 Ibid., p. 32. 
s The Principles of Pragmatism, p. 273. 

7 



8 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

transcendental use and yet, even in that very use, implies the functional 
application of it to make any sense: "Phenomena have, therefore, no 
existence apart from our consciousness of them: and that is what we 
mean by their transcendental ideality." 1 Again he declares: "Tran- 
scendental 'Aesthetic' cannot count the concept of change among its 
a priori data, because time itself does not change, but only something 
which is in time. For this, the perception of something existing and of 
the succession of its determinations, in other words, experience, is 
required." 2 Here he grasps the fact that it is change, succession that 
really afford the perception of time, yet he abstracts time itself as a 
concept. He does not pause to realize the necessarily concrete character 
of change. 

Similarly, of space, he writes: " Space is not an empirical perception 
which has been derived from external perceptions. Space is a necessary 
a priori idea which is presupposed in all external perceptions." 3 He says 
we experience space as a unity. Here he evidently confuses mathe- 
matical and psychological space. We may conceive space as a unity, 
but we actually experience only individual spaces. So true is this that, 
as James says, "Most of us are obliged to turn round and drop the 
thought of the space in front of us when we think of that behind." 4 
Later on Kant himself says: "Space and time are quanta continua, 
because no part of them can be presented that is not inclosed between 
limits (points or moments) and therefore each part of space is itself a 
space, each part of time is itself a time. Space consists only of spaces, 
time of times. There is no way of proving from experience that there 
is empty space and empty time"; 5 and very significantly for our present 
purposes in his Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science, where he 
must necessarily touch upon the real value of this form or category, he 
adds: "The absolute void and the absolute plenum are in the science of 
nature pretty much the same thing as blind chance and blind fate are in 
metaphysical cosmology, namely, a bar to inquiring reason. Every- 
thing that relieves us from the need of taking refuge in empty space is a 
real gain for natural science." 6 

Thus he first dogmatically assumes space and time as ontological 
realities, or if not quite ontological realities as transcendental idealities 
— yet, when it comes to concrete experience, which it must be noticed 

1 Watson, Selections, p. 173. 

2 Mueller's Trans., p. 33. 4 Psych., II, 275. 

3 Ibid., p. 18. 5 Watson, Selections, p. 98. 
6 Metaphysische Anjangsgrilnde der Wissenschaft, IV, 427. 



SPACE AND TIME 9 

is his only sphere of knowledge, space and time reduce to merely empirical 
cash value. Or, if this is held to be not antecedently the only alternative, 
what are space and time if not pure forms ? He treats them sometimes 
as pure forms, sometimes as something else. He inevitably raises this 
question, which remains unanswered. 

It seems highly significant, in Kant's whole treatment of space and 
time and particularly of space, that he resorts constantly to mathematics 
for an illustration of necessary a priori forms of knowledge and, as 
someone has remarked, it is always to pure mathematics, making no /^ 
distinction between it and applied mathematics. It may reasonably be y/ 
held that if Kant had placed less rationalistic confidence in the a priori 
certainty of mathematical knowledge, he would have succeeded in shifting 
the emphasis from constitutive to regulative in the treatment of all his 
forms and categories, instead of limiting the latter to certain "ideas of 
reason." It seems deplorable that his criticism could not, at the outset, 
have been turned to a more minute and genetic inquiry into the real 
character of geometry. He says : 

On the necessity of an a priori representation of space rests the apodictic 
certainty of geometrical principles and the possibility of their construction 
a priori. For if the intuition of space were a concept gained a posteriori, 
borrowed from general external experience, the first principles of mathematical 
definition would be nothing but perceptions. They would be exposed to all 
the accidents of perception, and there being but one straight line between two 
points would not be a necessity, but only something taught in each case by 
experience. Whatever is derived from experience possesses a relative generality 
only, based on induction. We should therefore not be able to say more than 
that, so far as hitherto observed, no space has yet been found having more than 
three dimensions. 1 

Along with Descartes he accepts mathematics as the ideal of scientific 
method. Particularly in his Prolegomena Kant practically contradicts 
his real critical position in this respect. In accepting and so readily 
explaining mathematics and physics as actual and valid bodies of 
knowledge that need no epistemological examination and vindication, 
he virtually abandons his critical ground and takes for granted what he 
started out to prove critically. His convenient straight line itself 
should have been subjected to a more severe genetic examination. 
Ladd says: 

If one wants to know what a straight line is actually, one must draw it by 
an act of constructive imagination. But Kant does not emphasize the truth 
that such drawing of a straight line is quite impossible for a mind that has not 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 19. 



IO 

previously traced some line, as seen or felt, actually limiting a thing perceived 
by the senses. That is to say, the grounds for the construction of a straight 
line, on which the foundations of all the mathematics of the geometrical order 
and all the mathematical sciences themselves are standing, are given only in 
the cognitive judgment which terminates a series of sense-perceptions. This 
process is an envisagement by thinking mind of the nature of the really existent 
as given to it in the object of sense-perception. What is true of those processes 
that constitute the actual experiences in which we come to the knowledge of the 
properties of a straight line, is true of all the experience which furnishes the 
other primary conceptions and axioms of geometry. As a science, a system of 
cognitions, it is not a mere product of imagination or of thought, much less 
of mere aggregated sensations or of associated ideas. It is rather a product of 
the entire mind in its actual living commerce with things. 1 

In this " living commerce with things," however, the pragmatist 
would take care to remind us that the mind is not restricted to mere 
envisagement, as this statement of Ladd might seem to imply. The 
mind's true role is rather that of reconstruction than of envisagement. 
Both mind and things are efficient factors in the outcome. A crude 
realism would emphasize only the things, leaving to mind the empty 
task of copying. Kant swings to the other extreme and seems to 
attribute to mind the power of constructing things regardless of any give 
and take, in the transformation of meaning through conflict and recon- 
stitution. The truth is, of course, that neither thing nor mind is alone 
the determining factor. 

Kant was powerfully influenced by the recent development of 
mathematical physics in his day. He declares: " The science of mathe- 
matics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may 
enlarge its domain without the aid of experience." 2 Again he says: 
" Since in any doctrine of nature only so much of real science is contained 
as there is knowledge a priori, every doctrine of nature will constitute 
a real science only in so far as mathematics can be applied to it." 3 In 
his reaction from Hume's skepticism he swung so far from the empirical 
attitude that he wanted to put the whole process of knowledge, or as 
much of it as he possibly could, into the mind's constituent forms 
themselves. But for this reaction he might have glimpsed the fact that 
mathematical science is as empirical ultimately as are the other sciences. 
He might have anticipated John Stuart Mill in recognizing that mathe- 
matical judgments have in the last analysis an empirical genesis, that 

1 Philosophy of Knowledge, pp. 259, 260. 

2 Mueller's trans., p. 572. 

3 Metaphysical Elements of Natural Sci., Preface. 



SPACE AND TIME II 

"axioms are experimental truths generalized from observation," or 
better, as the pragmatist would again amend, truths reached by the 
mind in its movement back and forth between observation and ideas, in 
the formation or re-formation of hypotheses. It was Mill's weakness at 
times to postulate a raw material of pure sensational data, forgetting the 
important fact indicated by himself in other places, that the positive 
aspects of scientific inquiry require the assistance of the mind's hypothe- 
ses, of ideas, to keep the "facts" from being meaningless or inadequate. 
Mill saw clearly, however, just in this connection, that the idea must 
develop within the same experience in which the facts play their part. 
Kant's confidence that the steps of the great mathematicians like 
Newton "became a highway on which the latest posterity may march 
with perfect confidence" 1 might have been rudely shaken could he have 
foreseen the efforts of a non-Euclidean geometry, coupled with its 
appropriate non-Newtonian mechanics, to describe our world as exactly 
as the Euclidean can do it. In the words of Lobachewsky, "We cognize 
directly in nature only motion, without which all the impressions our 
senses receive become impossible. All other ideas, for example 
geometric, though tied up implicitly in the properties of motion, are 
artificial products of our minds; and consequently space, by its own 
self, abstractly, for us does not exist." 2 If Kant had been less cavalier 
toward the psychological aspects of his problem, he might have realized, 
as have later thinkers, that geometry arose originally out of man's 
interest in the spatial relations of physical bodies about him, numerous 
facts testifying to its empirical origin; and that its development cannot 
be made intelligible apart from consideration of these. "The per- 
ception of space as a continuous whole goes back to such empirical 
elements as sensations of movement, sight, touch, the statical sense of 
the semicircular canals, the power of orienting the body with reference 
to presented stimuli." 3 The unitary conception of space resulting from 
all these factors is a complex phenomenon and is determined by the 
sensory factors that contribute to it. This is evidenced by the fact 
that psychological spaces which correspond to the different senses are 
not entirely identical. The unitary space-perception of a man blind from 
birth is of one sort and that of one of unimpaired vision is of another 
sort. Different forms of geometry have developed in accordance with 
these differences of sensory material and have been characterized as 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 583. 

2 Lobachewsky, New Principles of Geometry, p. 15 (Ed. Bruce Halstead). 

3 Ladd, op. cit., p. 229. 



12 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

motor, visual, etc., as they have placed chief emphasis on one or another 
of these sensory factors. Euclid's geometry is largely motor. Pro- 
jective geometry is visual. Moreover these psychological distinctions 
have played no inconsiderable part in the discussions as to the validity 
of these competitive systems of geometry. 1 

We might digress at this point also to say that Kant's confidence 
in the growing science of mathematical physics, the other field on which 
he drew for illustrations of necessary a priori judgments, might have been 
similarly shaken if the discoveries of radium and uranium had occurred 
in his day, and he would have been spared the error — in opposition to 
Hume — of getting too much fixity in his judgments, even allowing for 
his scrupulous care to adhere to general principles and not to pass over 
to specific laws. When such universally accepted rubrics as the atomic 
theory find themselves partly, at least, discredited by the advance of 
science, it is well not to try to make our physics too mathematical. It 
may be as difficult to apply mathematics in this rigid way to physics as 
Locke found it was to apply that science to ethics and for just the same 
reason, namely, because the facts are not all in or because the facts 
actually change. From the pragmatic or functional standpoint the 
facts in any science are only provisionally or tentatively given. Nothing 
can be said to be absolutely fixed, unless it be the fact of struggle, 
growth, purposive endeavor. Facts change, or if this seems harsh to 
the realist or the idealist, what seem to be unquestionable facts actually 
change, and for human experience this comes to the same thing. Truths 
are relative to the conditions, situations, problems in connection with 
which they take their genesis and as solutions for which they are for- 
mulated. When these problems and conditions change so-called truths 
are reformulated pari passu with the changes or advances. The so-called 
facts and truths of a given age come, therefore, to bear all the ear-marks 
of postulates or hypotheses. With a forward look and for the purpose 
they serve they are true and seemingly eternally true. From the back- 
ward look of succeeding ages they are revalued and often superseded. 
This is the fact of history, whatever may seem to be the verbal difficulties 
in the appraisement of them and of the fact. 

But, returning to Kant's own treatment of space, we find that he 
inevitably moves away from the transcendental to a functional statement 
himself whenever he approximates the real value of this category. 

Space does not represent any quality of objects by themselves, or objects 
in their relation to one another; i.e., space does not represent any determination 

1 Withers, Euclid's Parallel Postulate. 



SPACE AND TIME 13 

which is inherent in the objects themselves, and would remain, even if all 
subjective conditions of intuition were removed. For no determination of 
objects, whether belonging to them absolutely or in relation to others, can 
enter into our intuition before the actual existence of the objects themselves, 
that is to say, they can never be intuitions a priori. It is therefore from the 
human standpoint only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. If 
we drop the subjective condition under which alone we can gain external 
intuition, that is so far as we ourselves may be affected by objects, the repre- 
sentation of space means nothing. For this predicate is applied to objects 
only in so far as they appear to us, and are objects of our senses. Our dis- 
cussions teach, therefore, the reality, i.e., the objective validity, of space with 
regard to all that can come to us externally as an object, but likewise the 
ideality of space with regard to things when they are considered in themselves 
by our reason, and independent of the nature of our senses. 1 

And since these independent things have utterly, no significance for us, 
the meaning of space is limited to its functional use, whatever may be 
true of its genetic development. Kant adds: 

We maintain the empirical reality of space, so far as every possible external 
experience is concerned, but at the same time its transcendental ideality, that 
is to say, we maintain that space is nothing if we leave out of consideration the 
conditions of a possible experience, and accept it as something on which things 
by themselves are in any way dependent. 2 

In these utterances we have clearly stated the contradictory elements 
of the functional and the transcendental. Inasmuch as Kant constantly 
shows the futility of talking about an object outside "the conditions of 
a possible experience," we are warranted in holding that the only really 
valuable ingredient in his whole treatment of space is the functional — 
that which pertains to space "with regard to all that can come to us 
externally as an object." Even in the phrase "externally as an object" 
we have, of course, an abstraction the futility of which Kant is aiming 
all along to show. He does not realize the pitfalls into which he is 
betrayed by his own abstract terms. It was long ago pointed out that 
this manner of separating the elements of "poor sensation" and of 
mental powers is a work of mythology. 

My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one. There is not one 
moment of passive, inextensive sensation, succeeded by another of active 
extensive perception, but the form I see is as immediately felt as the color 
which fills it out. That the higher parts of the mind come in, who can deny ? 
They add and subtract, they compare and measure, they reproduce and 
abstract. They inweave the space-sensations with intellectual relations: but 

1 Mueller's trans., pp. 20, 22. 2 Ibid. 



14 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY 

these relations are the same when they obtain between the elements of the 
space-system as when they obtain between any of the other elements of which 
the world is made. 1 

Kant's mistake here as elsewhere in his " Anschauung with necessity" is 
in holding to a sensation-atomism, the view that originally a thing of 
sensation is given in consciousness which must first be brought into an 
orderly connection by the intellect. Yet what his whole deduction 
establishes is the fact that in sensation we have just one whole organic 
experience, that sensation existing by itself, apart from experience, is a 
meaningless expression. 

It is worthy of repetition, however, that Kant removes at one fell 
stroke the whole structure of naive realism in this treatment of space 
and time. He says: "If we take away the subject, or even only the 
subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature 
and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time 
themselves disappear." 2 In the words of Watson, "Kant rules out the 
doctrine of Newton that space is a real thing, the doctrine of Locke that 
it is a property of real things, and the doctrine of Leibnitz that it is a 
relation of real things." 3 In amendment of this the pragmatist would 
add simply, of real things as abstracted from our own mental needs 
and activity. 

To recapitulate, then, we find Kant oscillating between the two uses 
of his fundamental forms of perception — space and time. Rightly 
repudiating an empiricism that resolved experience into unrelated atoms 
leaving in reality no experience whatever, he seeks a way of securing 
unity. To do this he thinks it necessary to introduce a transcendental 
element — spaceless and timeless. His argument proceeds not by 
introspection but by formal reasoning. Assuming, in contradiction to 
all that he is setting himself to prove, that original sense-elements do 
exist in this primordial condition, he clamps down upon them his tran- 
scendental forms of space and time. He conceives space as a unity, 
holding unconsciously the mathematical viewpoint and failing to note 
the psychological development of our actual space experiences. His 
argument is valid only if we concede the premises — the original unrelated 
elements. Pragmatists do concede the fact of unity but deny the need 
of the transcendental. Kant himself exposes the weakness of his 
original assumption in proceeding to show that space and time are never 

1 James, Psychology, II, 275. 

2 Aesthetic (Mahaffy's trans.), II, 59. 

3 The Philosophy of Kant Explained (larger work), p. 90. 



* A 



SPACE AND TIME 1 5 

found as empty concepts, as mere preconditions to sensible experience, 
but as inevitably fast bound up with concrete material itself, as invariably 
functioning in situations of experience which preclude an abstraction of 
sense-elements on one side and forms of perception on the other. He 
does not, however, reach explicitly the pragmatic insight that our 
starting-point is neither non-temporal nor supra- temporal, but experience 
just as we find it. 



THE MIND'S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 

Kant's unconscious shifting from the transcendental to the functional 
runs through his twofold use of the categories in his "Deduction of the 
Categories," and his essential agreement with pragmatic doctrine, in so 
far as he keeps to the proper use of his concepts, comes to light in his 
teaching of the mind's determination of nature. 

Kant realizes clearly the difficulty involved in regarding the work of 
thought as merely reporting, representing, or pointing at an external, 
fixed reality. It is precisely this realization that leads him to introduce 
a transcendental logic, as over against the traditional analytic logic of 
the schools. He wants synthetic, not merely analytic judgments. 
With Locke he feels the need of something more than "trifling judg- 
ments." He wants thought to go forward and it cannot move onward 
if its task is merely to record something ready, given. In accounting 
for synthetic a priori judgments, in the deduction of his categories, he 
does just what this latest movement of philosophic thought has made 
prominent, namely, he shows that thought is constructive, that it 
functions in determining experience, and that it is the conditio sine qua 
non for an orderly, harmonious experience. He declares: "When we 
speak of the categories being necessary for our experience, what do we 
mean by experience? We mean a great complex, embracing a vast 
number of objects, and we also mean the legitimate and orderly con- 
nection of these objects into a great harmony or unity." 1 

His very theme has a pragmatic tone — How is experience possible ? 
He substitutes for the Greek objects (as Windelband terms them) given 
objects of which knowledge is the copy — experience, or what he calls 
phenomenal appearance. He does not seem to realize that in the 
phenomenal itself we may get real objects, the only objects that can be 
real for us, although this is implicitly suggested over and over in his 
thought. Indeed it is in places more than suggested. He does not 
actually oppose "phenomenal" to "real." In refuting idealism he 
expressly says in one place that the phenomenal does not exclude reality, 
but from the pragmatic standpoint he weakens this assertion by adding, 
"We cannot possibly know the thing by the senses as it is in itself." 3 
This involves an assumption that pragmatism does not make. But we 
are concerned now to see his pragmatic concessions. The old analytic 
logic, he says, dealt only with the forms of thought. Transcendental 

1 Prolegomena, p. 65. 3 Ibid., p. 43. 

16 



THE MIND'S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 1 7 

logic will enable us to determine the positive contents of knowledge. 
We want not merely a criterion of consistency, we want a criterion of 
truth itself. We want not merely to lay down the negative conditions 
of knowledge (although this is what the limited application of his 
revolution of thought amounted to in his first Critique), but we want to 
make positive advance in scientific information. How pragmatic this 
all sounds. 

Pragmatism and Kantianism agree that we ourselves help to make 
the reality which we know. When Kant asks, How is synthetic a priori 
knowledge possible, the answer runs that we know the part of reality 
which we ourselves make out of pure reason, without experience. But 
he reiterates that the only reality we do make and know is experienced 
reality. Pragmatism defends the view that we construct our reality — 
our orderly world — step by step, starting with provisionally given facts 
and postulating one hypothesis after another as ordering principles. 
Kant makes no attempt psychologically to detail the operations by 
means of which our thinking builds reality, but his ground principle 
that we participate in the process is sound pragmatic doctrine. At this 
point James raises a protest: "Superficially this sounds like Kant's 
view, but between categories fulminated before nature began, and cate- 
gories forming themselves in nature's presence the whole chasm between 
rationalism and empiricism yawns. To the genuine Kantianer, Schiller 
will always be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion." 1 This expresses what 
others have deemed to be one of the greatest differences between Kant 
and the pragma tist. It overlooks, however, the fact that Kant is not 
concerned with the psychological problem of the genetic origin of the 
categories, but with the epistemological problem of their value and 
function in experience. We are far from denying that it is precisely a 
genetic psychology that Kant needs in many places, but in his own 
justification he explicitly says: "We are discussing not the origin of 
experience, but of that which lies in experience. The former pertains to 
empirical psychology, and would even then never be adequately explained 
without the latter, which belongs to the Kritik of cognition, and particu- 
larly of the understanding." 2 A little concession on Kant's part to 
"the origin of experience" would have helped him to be more dynamic, 
less mechanical and structural. It would have enabled him to carry 
his Copernican revolution of thought out to its legitimate consequences, 
which he failed to do. As Schiller says, "Kant did not grasp all that is 
contained in ours — the real nature of our knowing not as a mechanical 

1 Pragmatism, p. 249. a Prolegomena, p. 61. 



J 



i8 

operation of pure intellect, but as a function motived by our needs, ends. 
He did not see that fundamental axioms (like causation) which he 
regarded as facts of mental structure originate in subjective demands." 1 
But, allowing for this limitation already discussed, it is with the doctrine 
of a constructed experience just the same that Kant and we are here 
concerned. Kant sees that nature does not prescribe laws to our 
understanding, for in that case we should have only empirical knowledge. u 
He means by this that we should have only accidents, fragments, dead 
copies. For an a priori knowledge of nature our understanding must v 
prescribe laws to nature. This means, to make use of trite allusions, 
that he cannot rest satisfied with the conception of the mind as an 
empty casket or a blank tablet whose sole function can be to take in or 
register what falls into or strikes it from an external source. That was 
just where Locke and Hume left the matter. Mill expressed the same 
reaction when he later asked, How can a series of impressions know itself 
as a series ? Kant says: "The understanding creates its laws not from 
nature, but prescribes them to it." 2 Here again is the cardinal error of 
separating two aspects of the knowing process, instead of treating that 
process as just one whole fact. But the problem had been transmitted 
to Kant in this form and our interest is in the hints given of the functional 
use of the categories. It is only to nature as phenomena or as a group 
of phenomena that the mind thus prescribes its laws. Our understand- 
ing cannot determine nature as a thing-in-itself or as a system of things- 
in- themselves. "The cognition of what cannot be an object of experi- 
ence would be hyperphysical, and concerning that the subject of our 
present discussion has nothing to say, but only concerning the cognition 
of nature, the reality of which can be confirmed by experience. Our 
inquiry here extends not to things-in-themselves, but to things as objects 
of possible experience, and the complex of these is what we properly 
designate as nature." 3 We are, therefore, justified in holding that the 
distinction between phenomena and noumena, while it constitutes an 
obstacle to a thoroughly consistent pragmatic attitude, and shows 
Kant's rationalistic predilections, is not logically germane to the problem 
he is here discussing. 

The tedious repetitions of Kant's own work are likely to encumber our 
comparative study, but it seems necessary to say that it would be idle 
to deny the error of Kant and his followers of the Hegelian school in 
disregarding the psychological aspects of the categories and in seeking to 

1 Studies in Humanism, p. 468. 

2 Prolegomena, p. 36. 3 Ibid., p. 51. 



J 



THE MIND'S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 19 

remain on the inner side of cognitive processes for a special theory of 
knowledge. The separation of stuff and form smacks of the outworn 
theory of separate soul-capacities, as well as of sensation-atomism. 
Pragmatists have rightly asked in what sense the categories are a priori 
— whether in a logical or psychological sense. Schiller has suggested 
that the Kantian categories as well as the forms of perception could show 
their exclusive validity only if the truth of his table of categories itself 
shows an a priori necessity of thought. If empirically they are verified 
before all others, they may be allowed to stand. But all subsequent 
research has shown just the opposite. It is far from our purpose to defend 
his table of categories or the artificial system of them and that is not the ■ 
point. Pragmatism constructs the categories as well as the forms of 
space and time as psychological facts, that is, as facts that do not contain 
a solution of the problems of knowledge, but are themselves the proper 
objects of psychological investigation. It recognizes the validity of no 
one table of categories alone. Their number and nature must depend 
upon our experience. They grow out from human personality and its 
needs as their starting-point, with the possibility of further future de- 
velopment. But it is doubtful if certain pragmatists, in their considera- 
tion of the categories, have done full justice to Kant's meaning, have seen 
his essential kinship with them in placing himself upon the phenomenal- 
istic standpoint. Kant holds that if nature were a connection of real 
things, we could arrive at a knowledge of the laws of this connection in two 
ways only; either because we should find these connections in experience 
or because, while we construct them out of our own forms of synthesis, it 
is so arranged that we get a knowledge of reality itself in the process. 
The second alternative assumes the pre-established harmony which Kant 
once for all repudiates. The nature with which Kant deals is just the 
sum total of phenomena, a number of mental representations held 
together by the mind's own laws. To be sure, in the background of his 
thought stand the Dinge an sich as the ultimate cause of our sensations, 
but they are negligible for his purposes here. The universal laws of 
nature are really the laws of thought which we discover in experience 
only because we have constructed that experience in accordance with 
them. This, at any rate, approximates the statement of our constructive 
(and possibly our purposive) mental activity as it is given by pragmatic 
thinkers. As to the first alternative, it ignores a critical examination of 
what a connection of real things could be apart from their entrance into 
our organic life, and the difficulty is the seeming implication that these 
real things might be found if we knew how to go after them. 



20 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

Pragmatists, in their handling of postulates, have explained away 
the Kantian criteria for valid a priori truth — his necessity and uni- 
versality. They regard necessity as simply the expression of a need on 
our part. We need the postulate and must have it as a means to our 
ends. "If we make a demand that a certain principle shall hold, we 
naturally extend our demand to all cases without distinction of time past, 
present, and to come." 1 But is this essentially different from Kant's 
meaning? His universality and necessity are virtually one, for the 
former depends upon the latter. It is difficult to see in the "a priori 
necessity" of judgments or categories an import vitally distinct from 
the pragmatic recognition that "no experience can upset them because 
they are now a part of the structure of our mind." Indeed, if we may 
linger here just a moment, whatever difference there is in the two 
statements might be claimed for Kant's credit, for while "the structure 
of the mind" might conceivably be modified by a change of diet or 
climate affecting the nervous mechanism, Kant's criteria set forth the 
necessary conditions of experience. Experience may cease to be, but so 
long as we do business at all in the world of thinking we shall have to deal 
in such manner as to be understood. Kant presupposes an objective 
common test. Pragmatists have given more attention to the supposed 
derivation of categories in the experience of the race, but we have already 
indicated that Kant was not concerned with the evolutionary aspect 
of them. Again we concede his limitations. He does not pause to 
inquire enough as to the relative stability of the concepts with which 
thought must operate. Professor A. W. Moore has well said: "The 
certainty of the categories is even more fatally universal than the tides 
or the eclipses." 2 Kant says explicitly: "So there arose the pure 
concepts of the understanding, concerning which I could make certain 
that these and this exact number only constitute our whole cognition of 
things from pure understanding." 3 In working over his concepts 
according to the Aristotelian tradition he took his resultant table much 
too .seriously. His reality is not fluid and plastic enough for the prag- 
matist, but his conception of the relation of thinking to truth and reality 
leans directly toward pragmatism. While he held the conception of 
deductive certainty as the ideal of science and was still burdened with 
the view of final, unmodifiable knowledge, yet we may recognize the value 

1 Schiller, Personal Idealism, "Axioms as Postulates," p. 69. 
3 Pragmatism and Its Critics, p. 73. 
3 Prolegomena, p. 85. 



THE MIND'S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 21 

of his position for scientific procedure for all time. In the language 
of DeLaguna: 

We are in possession of a number of very general principles, to which we 
attribute a truth that is not conceived as open to correction by any experience, 
inasmuch as all the particulars of experience are interpreted in accordance with 
these principles, and any observation which apparently contradicted them 
would rather itself be denied than cause a modification in these principles. 
These principles are obviously synthetic, and thus open to formal questioning, 
and no demonstration of their truth can be given; but they constitute the 
most comprehensive organization of our experience, and it is in this function 
that their validity consists. The reality of phenomena in our experience has 
no further assignable meaning than their conformity to these most general 
conditions of experience. 1 

Schiller gives the statement: "The a priori axioms are facts — real, solid, 
observable, mental facts — and woe betide the philosopher who collides 
with them. In one word they are psychical facts of the most indubitable 
kind." 2 Such expressions are hardly a forced paraphrase of Kant's 
statement, if we are looking for his real meaning. There is every reason 
to believe that he would have welcomed Darwin's discoveries and all 
the adjustments of thinking that flow from them, for no thinker was 
more hospitable than Kant to every desirable advance in scientific 
procedure. 

It is exceedingly difficult, from our modern standpoint, in considering 
the categories, to eliminate the genetic and even the chronological 
aspects of their development and keep the attention focused on their 
purely logical nature. This is but another way of saying that the lines 
of sheer demarkation between psychology, logic, and epistemology have 
broken down. The whole problem is one that essentially involves 
psychology. Kant is seeking to describe what actually takes place in 
an act of knowing — a matter of psychological fact. Logic may then 
claim the task of evaluating these processes, of ascertaining whether our 
judgments attain the truth at which they aim. If epistemology is to 
have any legitimate field of its own, it must embrace these two aspects, 
rather than assume an attitude of indifference toward either of them. 
Had there been in Kant's day a body of genetic psychology and had he 
found as ready at hand the means to resort to its aid as do the prag- 
matists, the kinship between his purposes and theirs would be more easy 

1 Dogmatism and Evolution, p. 213. 
3 Personal Idealism, p. 79. 



22 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY 

of establishment and the implied functional leaning of his thought would 
be nearer to explicit statement. He desired, as he would phrase it, to 
keep his Critique clear of all doubtful opinions regarding the descriptive 
and explanatory science of cognition. Can we wonder at this when we 
remember the unsatisfactory character of the attempts of Locke and 
Berkeley, when we recall particularly Hume's difficulties in reducing the 
self to "nothing but a bundle of different perceptions," "all probable 
reasoning to nothing but a species of sensation," and his utter failure to 
account for what knowledge we do possess? It was the faulty psy- 
chology of his predecessors that alienated Kant from the psychological 
standpoint. But he failed to see that his own epistemology involved 
those same faults on the other side. Hume left experience, to borrow a 
homely metaphor, as a tableful of detached pieces of cloth. Kant put 
them together with exaggerated emphasis upon the seams. Neither of 
them grasped the truth that experience is just one seamless garment, one 
whole within which the distinctions are set up between subject and 
object, between mind and the quality which it perceives. Hume's 
limitation was not, as Kant supposed, in the excess of his psychology 
but in the superficiality of his psychology. Kant's effort to divorce the 
theory of knowledge from a critical opinion upon questions in the 
psychology of knowledge was not only impossible but incompatible with 
his original purpose. To apply the critical method to his naive assump- 
tions is only to follow him in the spirit, if it does seem to contradict 
him in the letter. 

Pragmatists would say that human knolwedge from the beginning 
must have developed just in the way we now see it going forward; or 
rather, being obligated to deal only with knowledge as we now possess it, 
they would imply that, so far as reference is made to the past, it must 
obviously be in accordance with our present method of knowing. Funda- 
mentally this is quite in harmony with Kant's Critique. It was precisely 
his theme that if we think at all we must think in a certain way, according 
to certain conditions. This is the gist of his whole deduction of the 
categories. It has long been a truth trite to the student of Kant that 
by a priori he did not mean chronologically a priori. Yet this fact is 
forgotten by some of his critics. James and Schiller have stressed the 
view that the method of growth in human knowledge from the earliest 
stages of mental life, from the first given stuff of immediate and 
unanalyzed consciousness — if one may speak tentatively of "given 
stuff" — to an ordered world of thought and conduct, has been the 
adoption of postulates. Such postulates on their primitive level were 



THE MIND S CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 23 

scarcely more than the tentative proving of new general perceptions, 
as compared with the conceptual hypothesizing of present-day science. 
James gathers the matter up in these effective words : 

There is probably not a common-sense tradition, of all those that we now 
live by, that was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive 
generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia, of reflex 
action, or of fitness to survive. The notions of one time and one space as 
single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, 
matter and mind; between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the 
conception of classes with sub-classes within them ; the separation of fortuitous 
from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite con- 
quests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempts to get the 
chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manage- 
able shape. They proved of such sovereign use as Denkmittel that they are 
now a part of the very structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose 
with them. No experience can upset them. On the contrary, they apper- 
ceive every experience and assign it to its place. 1 

The categories of Kant stand on the same level with perceptions of 
so-called common-sense, with thing, body, attribute, spirit. They were 
set up as principles for the comprehension and organization of the 
immediately given material of life, even before the conception of a postu- 
late or a hypothesis was abstractly or consciously formulated. Every 
new vindication which a hypothesis found in experience brought it 
nearer the range of certain truth. Every new verification helped to 
harden the original beliefs into knowledge. These general perceptions 
and categories have now served their purpose for untold generations, 
assisting in the establishment of an ordered reality. Small wonder that 
they should finally come to be regarded as possessions of pure reason, 
independently of all experience. In reality the difference between these 
most certain truths and the most daring hypotheses is merely one of 
degree. They differ not in the manner of their arising, but by their age, 
by the extent of their influence and verification, in short, by their working. 
Kant's categories like all others are a collection of successful postulates. 
They have been verified from age to age until our whole speech now 
rests upon them and we could hardly think naturally in any other 
expressions. 

Accepting this account as substantially correct, we believe that it is 
not far removed from Kant's own meaning. In his "Ideas of Reason" 
Kant hints at all this through his mechanical and technical terminology 
and even in the "Analytic" itself we come upon plain suggestions of the 

1 The Meaning of Truth, p. 62. 



24 

functional character of all the categories. We have said that he would 
have profited by a genetic investigation of the relation of thinking to 
other modes of experience and by an inquiry into the specific conditions 
under which thought-processes arise. Specific conditions he disclaimed 
any treatment of except to say emphatically that definite, specific laws 
cannot be determined by pure reason. His persistence in keeping to the 
general conditions has aroused in some minds the suspicion that the 
organic and functional character of thinking was wholly unappreciated 
by him. It is, however, neither necessary nor just to regard his episte- 
mology as an outworn relic of rationalism. It has a forward as well as 
a backward look and value. 

To summarize, then, Kant's doctrine of nature, before proceeding to 
a more minute study of the worth of his categories, we have found him 
approximating a distinctively dynamic explanation of our actual world 
and life. The mind, with its forms and categories, working with concrete 
material, constructs its phenomenal world governed by its own laws. 
It does not find an external world of nature to be merely copied or 
represented by its ideas — thus he disposes of realism. Nor does it, on 
the other hand, create and evolve the world of nature out of its own pure 
activity — this should have forewarned and prevented the systems of 
pantheistic idealism that offered themselves as the completion of his 
thought. It supplies the forms only, co-operating with an element from 
ultimate things. The latter is a residual element involving an assump- 
tion from which he was unable to escape. His approach to pragmatic 
attitudes appears in the fact that mind does furnish these constituent 
factors, that it functions in the upbuilding and systematic ordering of 
the only world of nature which it knows or with which it has anything 
to do. Mind and nature develop from within experience itself. 



THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES 

We wish to inquire first if, in the " Schematism of the Categories," it 
does not appear that these connecting principles of Kant, to have any 
real significance, are really functional, limited to their cash value in 
arranging, correcting, reorganizing concrete experience. 

The very fact that Kant finds it necessary to ask, "How can the 
categories be applied to phenomena?" and to find "some third thing 
homogeneous on the one side with the category and on the other side with 
the phenomenon, that renders the application of the former to the latter 
possible," shows that they must be taken functionally to make sense. 
He explicitly says that the purpose of the schema is to confine the 
concept to its "restricted application." "For concepts are quite 
impossible and cannot have any meaning unless there be an object 
given either to them, or at least to some of the elements of which they 
consist, and they can never refer to things-in- themselves." 1 He con- 
tinues: "These schemata therefore of the understanding are the true 
and only conditions by which these concepts can gain a relation to 
objects, that is a significance." 2 In the second edition, especially, Kant 
added some significant words regarding special laws that bear upon our 
comparative study, as indicating the reduction of the transcendental to 
the functional. He added: "The pure faculty of the understanding is 
not competent by means of mere categories to prescribe any a priori laws 
to phenomena, except those which form the foundation of nature in 
general, as a uniform system of phenomena in space and time. Special 
laws, inasmuch as they relate to empirically determined phenomena, 
cannot be fully deduced from pure laws, although they all stand in a 
body under them." 3 Empirical laws, then, are not derived from pure 
understanding. Empirically given facts or objects are required for the 
application of these principles. The real value of the categories is 
limited to their scientific employment. 

"The schema of the triangle is simply a rule for the synthesis of the 
imagination, in the determination of pure figures in space." That is 
to say, "triangle" is merely a way the mind takes of constructing its 
experience that will be dependable for all phenomena requiring treatment 
in a certain way. What kind of synthesis can it be if not functional ? 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 114. 3 Ibid., p. 119. 

3 Mahaffy's trans., p. 26, end (2d ed.). 

25 



26 

We should have mere verbiage. The same statement might be made of 
the concept of a tree or of any other object. " The concept of dog means 
a rule according to which my imagination can always draw a general 
outline of a four-footed animal, without being restricted to any particular 
figure supplied by experience." 1 This simply means that general ideas 
or concepts are as necessary for rational experience as are the images of 
particular ideas. They do not exist off in a world by themselves. Kant 
is particularly careful here to show that categories are for use in response 
to the highest intellectual need of our lives, namely, unity. He says: 
"The schema of a pure concept is nothing but the pure synthesis deter- 
mined by a rule of unity. It amounts to nothing else but to the unity 
of the manifold and therefore indirectly to the unity of apperception, as 
an active function corresponding to the internal sense." 2 " The categories 
are thus in the end of no other but a possible empirical use." 3 

He proceeds: "The schema of substance is the permanence of the 
real in time — persisting while all else changes." As we should say, it is 
a means of determining what we can find, what will stay put, what can 
be depended on in a changing order or series. Its application involves 
empirical objects and empirical change. When Kant undertakes in 
another place the scientific treatment of matter or substance, he regards 
it, as did Leibnitz, not as something dead, inert, but as energy, force; 
he shows that it is a something which affects our senses. But, as our 
senses can be affected only by motion, immediately we come to the 
functional determination of matter as motion. Substance or matter is 
that which is movable in space — das Bewegliche in RaunieS This may 
be taken not unfairly as illustrative of what Kant means in his schema- 
tism of the concept. 

Cause is a way of getting regularity of succession under conditions of 
time. It is a conception to be used of the particular objects of experience 
in relation to each other, but perfectly meaningless if applied to experi- 
ence as a whole. The postulate that every event must have its cause 
verifies itself, as the pragmatist would say, in its successful application 
as an instrument for controlling the world of experience. It serves us 
because we wish to be in position to call forth or arrest its influence. 
"The concept of cause implies a rule, according to which one state 
follows another necessarily." Kant immediately adds its hypothetical 
character in the admission, "but experience can only show us that one 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 116. 

2 Ibid., p. 119. 3 Ibid. 

4 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschqft, p. 320. 



THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES 27 

state of things often, or at most, commonly follows another, and therefore 
affords neither strict universality nor necessity." 1 

In his treatment of cause Kant undoubtedly took himself too 
seriously in holding that he had added materially to Hume's account. 
What he has added, and what brings out clearly the implied pragmatic 
character of all his categories, is that cause must be hypothecated to 
render experience orderly, satisfactory — to give us a rational world. 
Hume's ''problematical concept," as he calls it, becomes his own hypo- 
thetical concept and the only real difference is that he sees better than 
Hume that the hypothesis must be held if we are to have an experience that 
will hold together. It is simply a human need that changes the judgment 
of perception, "If the sun shines long enough upon a body it grows 
warm," into the judgment of experience, "The sun is by its light the 
cause of heat." Experience is more than a mere aggregate of per- 
ceptions. It requires thoroughly and necessarily valid rules. But Kant 
forgets at times wherein consists the test of their validity. Yet in the 
same place quoted from above he adds distinctly: "I do not at all 
comprehend the possibility of a thing generally as a cause, because the 
concept of cause denotes a condition not at all belonging to things, but 
to experience." 2 

Referring again to space under this special chapter, Kant hints that 
this form itself must be schematized and seen in its functional aspects to 
afford meaning. "Space is the pure image of all quantities before the 
external sense." In the Dialectic he again says: "Space, though it is 
only a principle of sensibility, yet serves originally to make all forms 
possible, there being only limitations of it. For that very reason, 
however, it is mistaken for something necessary and independent, nay, 
for an object a priori existing in itself. Thus a regulative principle has 
been changed into a constitutive principle."* We might add, in illustra- 
tion of its regulative or practical use and of the criterion of its validity, 
that the Euclidean conception of space and the corresponding geometry 
built upon the postulate of plane rather than spherical triangles has been 
held true and has to this day refused to be displaced by some competitive 
conception simply because it has satisfied human needs or, at any rate, 
men have thought that it did. It enabled the astronomers, for example, 
to calculate with approximate and satisfactory accuracy the dimensions 
of the farthest systems of suns and other matters of scientific interest 
involving its application. 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 74. 

2 Prolegomena, p. 70. 3 Mueller's trans., p. 499. 



28 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

Thus all the categories when schematized appear as rules or guides 
to practical conduct. They have what the pragma tist would call a 
purely instrumental character. What other " deduction" have they? 
In the schematism, says Kant, thought moves under the conditions of 
time. When does thought ever move outside of these conditions? 
Kant's concepts are constitutive only when he gets out of time and 
"rides his high horse." When applied practically they all reduce to 
dependability. Watson, in his later work, gathers the matter up 
admirably: 

Examination shows that the limitation of the categories to objects of 
sensible experience applies to every one of them. It is not possible to give a 
real definition of any category, or a single principle of the understanding, 
without schematizing it. The principle of substance, taken by itself, is merely 
the conception of that which is always subject and never predicate; but we 
have no possible knowledge of any actual object conforming to this definition 
except an object that is presented to us as that which, in contrast to its chan- 
ging accidents, is permanent in time. The categories, then, in every case are 
limited to phenomena. 1 

We shall see later that in the "Transcendental Dialectic" Kant 
really justifies the ideas of reason, even those which are demonstrated 
to have no value as purely speculative concepts, by the extension and 
application of this schematism. He virtually deduces them all as he 
deduces his main concepts — substance and causality. 

Kant's things-in-themselves deserve examination in a separate 
chapter, but so far as the schematism of the categories is concerned the 
matter may be disposed of by saying with Paulsen that Kant really has 
two tables of categories — "a pure conceptual one, and one reduced to 
sensuous terms; a purely logical, and a table of real categories." 2 The 
significant fact that we are stressing is that only the table of functional 
categories has any validity for the world as we know it, for actual experi- 
ence. Kant does unmistakably shift from one table to the other and 
does apply them to things-in-themselves. Yet again and again he comes 
back to their true practical use, and no one could state more forcefully 
than he the futility of any but functional categories. Under the 
"Discipline of Pure Reason" he summarizes the whole matter in these 
pragmatic words: 

As we cannot form the least conception of the possibility of a dynamical 
connection a priori, and as the categories of the pure understanding are not 

1 The Philosophy of Kant Explained (later work), p. 222. 

2 Immanuel Kant, p. 184. 



THE SCHEMATISM OF THE CATEGORIES 20, 

intended to invent any such connection, but only, when it is given in experience, 
to understand it, we cannot by means of these categories invent one single 
object as endowed with a new quality not found in experience, or base any 
permissible hypothesis on such a quality; otherwise we should be supplying 
our reason with empty chimeras, and not with concepts of things. Thus it is 
not permissible to invent any new and original powers as, for instance, an 
understanding capable of perceiving objects without the aid of the senses, or a 
force of attraction without any contact, a new kind of substance that should 
exist, for instance, in space, without being impenetrable, and consequently, 
also, any connection of substances different from that which is supplied by 
experience; no presence except in space, no duration except in time. In one 
word, our reason can only use the conditions of possible experience as the 
conditions of the possibility of things; it cannot invent them independently, 
because such concepts, although not self-contradictory, would always be 
without an object. 1 

Pragmatism would correct this statement only in the direction of 
recognizing unambiguously the dynamic use of concepts. It is evident 
that by a dynamical connection a priori Kant is harboring his delusion as 
to possible intelligible conditions- as contrasted with phenomenal, is still 
separating matter and form, not realizing that the word dynamical 
would admirably characterize just the actual work of his categories as 
he here describes or hints at it. Kant has felt the futility of this dis- 
tinction all along in trying to bridge the gap with a third term. What 
he failed to see is the fact that there is no gap to be bridged, there is no 
such thing as possible datum outside of meaning, of thought; what 
really exists is just the whole experience. From the phenomenal side, 
however, his statement makes crystal clear the use of his concepts within 
the process of getting knowledge or experience as we have it, and that 
by no possibility can they be stretched to apply to outside objects. 

In Kant's constant mania for schematizing, therefore, in the immedi- 
ate necessity which he feels to apply his categories, to rind a bond of 
connection between them and phenomena, we have a virtual recognition 
of the meaningless character of purely logical categories. As Paulsen 
says, "All kinds of devices and padding were invented to fill out the 
vacant places of the a priori scheme." 2 His schematism practically 
means the reduction of his categories to terms of sense. It is instructive, 
for our purposes, to notice how he is forced over into the actual functional 
work and worth of our mental concepts even when his object is to 
remain on the inner side of mental life. The schematism is supposed by 

3 Mueller's trans., p. 618. 

1 Immanuel Kant, p. 71. 



30 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

him to be "an art hidden away in the depths of the human soul, the 
secret of which we need not hope to drag forth to the light of day." 1 It 
is introduced at first to show how a factor of "pure a priori imagination" 
unites with an empirical factor in the application of our understanding to 
phenomena. In the actual outcome, however, this "hidden art" 
becomes a way of filling up empty concepts with real meaning. The 
various schemata are virtually "belated definitions" of logical forms 
when they are no longer pure but really instrumental for experience, 
when they have some real work to do. In all of this Kant treats his 
transcendental elements not as antecedent to, contrasted with, or 
actually separable from, the functional, but merely as subphases or 
factors in the functional process itself. Any real demarkation between 
the two aspects fades out in their application. 

1 Watson, Selections, p. 87. 



THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON— THE ANTINOMIES 

In Kant's treatment of the regulative use of the ideas of reason and 
in the section of the "Transcendental Dialectic" leading up to these we 
come into close relations with the pragmatic doctrine of the notion of 
truth and the nature of truth. 

From the very beginning of the pragmatic movement the similarity 
of Kant's postulates of the practical reason for moral and religious ends 
to certain features of the pragmatic attitude has been noted, but it has 
not always been observed that in the "Dialectic" of the Critique of Pure 
Reason itself Kant gives a relatively exhaustive consideration to the 
postulates or hypotheses of pure reason for scientific purposes, and 
further that he treats the ideas of reason with a full appreciation of their 
teleological bearings, or, as the pragmatist would phrase it, with a 
realization of the purposive character of all human thinking. 

We may not, of course, in strict accord with pragmatic ways of 
thought and expression, recognize any clear distinction between theo- 
retical and practical reason; yet Kant's frequent resort to these anti- 
thetic terms makes it difficult to discuss his system without them. We 
are reminded, too, in this pragmatic comparison, of Professor Lovejoy's 
contention that there are thirteen different types of pragmatism; yet, as 
it is true that psychologists of all shades are agreed as to the main topics 
to be treated by that science, just so may we indulge the hope that 
pragmatic thinkers, fairly understood, are not seriously at variance as to 
their main tenets. 

Pragmatism has no trouble with the right of practical reason in 
holding as true that which verifies itself in practical consequences; that 
which aids in the construction of a world-whole in which our feeling and 
active being are harmonized; or if not a world- whole, specific wholes to 
meet specific problems, for pragmatism is not as much concerned with 
the problem of a world- whole as are idealistic schemes of thought. The 
theoretical reason also might be conceded the right to hold as true that 
which enables the intellect to govern its ordered world. James says: 
"Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory 
relations with other parts of experience, to summarize them and get 
about among them by conceptual short cuts instead of following the 
interminable succession of particular phenomena." 1 If we accept the 

1 Pragmatism, p. 58. 

31 



32 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

definition of truth which makes it that which works in its practical 
consequences, the theoretical and practical reason would seem to reduce 
to the same footing, and this is virtually the outcome of Kant's treatment 
of his "Ideas of Reason." 

The critics of pragmatism have thought that there is a profound 
difference between the two. Practical reason, they would say, may claim 
the right, in questions that cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, 
to assist in bringing about a solution by practical belief, hypothe- 
sis. But the case is different when we are dealing with objective facts 
or realities the truth of which does not depend on our attitude of faith. 
Here we move upon purely intellectual grounds, in the realm of the 
theoretical reason. Here the intellect ignores the interests of free will 
and the field is closed to voluntary hypotheses. This statement would 
probably stand from the viewpoint of either the realist or the idealist. 

Now it should be noted in passing that James nowhere maintains 
that any sort of satisf actoriness suffices to establish the truth of a propo- 
sition, and that in this connection he is dealing with cases where all 
theoretic signs fail and where the will-to-believe is invoked as an unavoid- 
able substitute. He definitely expresses himself to this effect in a letter 
to a German contemporary 1 as well as in other places. But James and 
other pragmatists do contend that the intellect — even theoretical 
intellect — is made up of practical interests, and therefore that the word 
theoretical in this sharp sense is a misnomer. This is practically what is 
meant by the "instrumental" view of truth taught by Dewey and Moore 
at Chicago and promulgated by Schiller from Oxford. James says: 

It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical 
interests. The theory of evolution is beginning to do good service in its 
reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. Cognition, in this view, 
is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain point, of what in its 
totality is a motor phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend 
that cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The 
germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before con- 
sciousness is not the theoretical, " What is that ?" but the practical, "Who goes 
there?" or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, "What is to be done — 
Was fang ich an?" In all our discussions about the intelligence of lower 
animals, the only test we use is that of their acting, as if for a purpose. 
Cognition, in short, is incomplete until discharged in act." 2 

Many of the grotesque interpretations or misinterpretations of the 
pragmatic definition of truth would have been spared us if its critics had 

1 Kant Studien, XIV, 24. 

2 Will-to-Believe, p. 85. 



THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON — THE ANTINOMIES 33 

grasped fully the fact that pragmatism does not designate as true 
whatever is useful to our practical interests in the daily sense of the word. 
Says James again: 

The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of 
possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations 
as anything I know in recent philosophical history. Schiller says the true is 
that which works. Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to 
the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is that which gives satisfaction. 
He is treated as one who believes in calling anything true which, if it were true, 
would be pleasant. 1 

Pragmatic doctrine is that the worth of a scientific hypothesis consists 
in most, if not in all cases, in its usefulness in striving for an ever-greater 
simplification and unity of our world of experience in all of its aspects, 
or where that unity has been destroyed by new complications and 
differentiations, to overcome the destructive conflict and proceed by a 
better method of organization and control. Now with this let us 
compare Kant's explicit declaration that "all interest is at last practical 
and what the speculative reason itself postulates is completed only in 
practical use." 2 The atomic theory, to resume a former illustration, 
long cherished as indubitable scientific truth, was true in so far as it 
offered a workable basis for simplifying and understanding a mass of 
facts. Now that we have more facts, or facts of a different kind, we need 
a modification of that theory to restore satisfaction. In Dewey's 
decisive words, "In every scientific inquiry there has been relegation of 
accepted meanings to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage 
of some of the accepted facts to the region of mere hypothesis and 
opinion. Conversely there has been a continued issuing of ideas from 
the region of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted and 
meaningful contents." 3 Now, the faithful expositor of Kant may 
contend that, while this is good rebuttal for the realist or the idealist, as 
correcting static inclinations, it does not touch Kant's fundamental 
positions. Any suggested need of evolution in his principles is from 
the mark, for modern discoveries in biological and physical science — 
radium, electrons, or what not — in no wise discredit or weaken the laws 
of experience as he laid them down. He was careful to say that only the 
general conditions of experience are to be regarded as a priori. The 
uncompromising Kantianer may hold that Kant was merely dealing 

1 Pragmatism, p. 234. 

2 Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, II, 3 am Ende (Mahaffy). 

3 Studies in Logical Theory, p. 12. 



34 

with the common necessity of connecting experience by cause and effect, 
of making a necessary distinction between substance and states so that 
we may think of something as changing without being involved in utter 
discontinuity; that whatever be the more particular problems with 
which he made no pretense of dealing, the same quality of necessity 
attaches to his general principles today as was clearly seen by him to 
belong to them at that time. If this contention be true, Kant is even 
more consistent with modern pragmatism than we had hoped to show. 
We have conceded the great value of these general principles, but it 
would seem, from the functional standpoint, that he was too much 
hemmed in by a mechanical conception of the world in entertaining the 
belief that for scientific unity and coherence certain concepts could be 
specified once for all, with no possibility of future questioning. As 
Paulsen has suggested, it is not quite inconceivable that there might be 
a future metamorphosis of the forms of perception and thought. Kant 
was, however, essentially correct in affirming that the demand for unity 
and continuity lies at the base of all the forms and ideas by which we 
aim to understand nature and the world. We believe that his whole 
statement of the regulative ideas of reason accords with the functional 
conception of the nature of truth in the domain of scientific thought and 
investigation as well as for moral and religious ends. 

Here again it is significant that in his contrast of constitutive and 
regulative principles of reason the only principles dogmatically assumed 
as constitutive are the mathematical. His effort is to conceive of others 
after the analogy of these, never suspecting that mathematics is as 
empirical as biology. Now it is true that in mathematics we do proceed 
to a greater extent upon our own hypotheses than in biology, yet, as we 
have seen, geometry implies space, and space implies an arrangement of 
sense-perceptions. Once over this difficulty, however, Kant, in his 
treatment of the antinomies, reveals the instrumental character of the 
principles of reason. The whole difficulty is shown to arise from the 
attempt to apply concepts that are limited to experience, to a world of 
ultimate things — to hypostasize them. At this point again the gap 
exists between him and the pragmatist, the latter having no ultimate 
objects standing off there in a region by themselves. We do not seek to 
make Kant more modern or self -consistent than he is. These are due 
to his retention of assumptions. Yet, for logical purposes, these ultimate 
things are not an essential feature and they do not prevent him from 
elucidating the functional nature of his principles of reason: "Now it 
has been clearly enough shown that the principle of reason is not a con- 



THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON — THE ANTINOMIES 35 

stitutive principle of objects in themselves but is merely a rule for the 
continuation and extension of a possible experience. If we keep this 
steadily before our eyes, the conflict of reason with itself is at an end." 1 
Again, "Everything in the world of sense has an empirically conditioned 
existence and no property of a sensible object has unconditioned neces- 
sity." 2 He shows that a metaphysic of that which cannot be experienced 
is impossible. In his discussion of the antinomies he indicates that the 
old mistake of Zeno's puzzles is repeated — the mistake of taking concepts 
in two different connotations. But he fails to see, after all, that he 
repeats the same old error himself in admitting by implication "objects 
beyond experience." He does not realize the uselessness of not limiting 
reality to the first and proper use of the categories. 

With tedious detail and reduplication he shows that the cosmological 
ideas are fruitlessly making their dialectical play because "they do not 
even admit of any adequate object being supplied to them in any possible 
experience, not even of reason treating them in accordance with the 
general laws of experience." 3 "Nevertheless," he says, "these ideas are 
not arbitrary fictions, but reason in the continuous progress of empirical 
synthesis is necessarily led on to them. "4 That is to say, even ideas that 
are not scientifically valid are adopted or develop precisely out of certain 
inevitable problems. What then constitutes the difference between 
them and ideas that are valid ? Just the fact that they lack objects or 
experiences to verify them. Other ideas of reason, he proceeds to show, 
do have a certain verification. 

Kant is concerned in this section as throughout his system that 
empiricism itself shall not become dogmatic, any more than rationalism, 
and assume to "boldly deny what goes beyond the sphere of its intuitive 
knowledge." 5 We are not to be deprived of our "intellectual presump- 
tions or of our faith in their influence upon our practical interests." 6 
How similar this is in sound to the will-to-believe. Such intellectual 
presumptions and faith must not, however, take "the pompous titles of 
science and rational insight, because true speculative knowledge can never 
have any other object but experience." 7 Could anything more be 
needed to show that Kant realized the practical and purposive character 
of mental activity ? He removes knowledge (false knowledge) to save 
belief (belief that has significance for practical ends). Why does Kant 

1 Watson, Selections, p. 173. 

2 Ibid., p. 193. s Ibid., p. 386. 

3 Mueller's trans., p. 379. 6 Ibid., p. 385. 

4 Ibid. i Ibid. 



36 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

so laboriously examine these "transcendental problems of pure reason" 
and why is it absolutely necessary that we find their solution ? Precisely 
in the interest of scientific and moral progress, that man may not oscillate 
constantly from one side to the other of opposed meanings or doctrines, 
but may have a definite criterion for the retention and use of these ideas. 
And what is that criterion as Kant here develops it? It is just the 
workableness of ideas for human satisfaction — ideas, let us observe, that 
are not dialectically subjected to or subject to contradiction by being 
stretched beyond their true functional application. That application is 
established by their critical examination and the careful elimination of 
all ideas that have no objects of experience, with yet a tolerant word in 
excuse of even invalid ideas that spring up as supposed — falsely supposed 
— solutions of problems. 

Incidentally, in this section, Kant seems to sustain the pragmatist as 
over against the realist and possibly as against the absolutist. He says: 

The objects of experience are therefore never given by themselves, but in 
our experience only, and do not exist outside it. That there may be inhabitants 
in the moon, though no man has ever seen them, must be admitted [living today 
it would be Mars] ; but it means no more than that in the possible progress of 
our experience, we may meet with them; for everything is real that hangs 
together with a perception, according to the laws of empirical progress. They 
are therefore real if they are empirically connected with any real consciousness, 
although they are not therefore real by themselves; that is, apart from that 
progress of experience. 1 

Dewey might well have used this as illustrative of his "present as 
absent" or "experienced as absent," of the fact that the contrast of 
present and absent or present and past must itself fall within experience. 
Where else can it fall ? It is noticeable also that Kant does not explain 
the possible existence of moon-dwellers as existence for the absolute 
consciousness. How is it likely that he would deal with such facts as the 
glacial epoch ? Would he not seem to agree with D. L. Murray that — 

we mean only that our experience is such now that it is best explained by a 
belief (pragmatically confirmed in every moment of our lives) that reality has 
had a history and that a glacial epoch occurred in that history. This painful 
experience therefore would presumably have been ours, had we entered into 
the world-process at that stage, and this whole history is so essentially knit up 
with the reality of our present world, that it is as real as it and as real as we. 2 

It cannot be ignored that Kant, in his teaching of empirical realism 
and transcendental idealism, does give unconsciously two totally distinct 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 402. 2 "Pragmatic Realism," Mind, XXXIV, 385. 



THE REGULATIVE USE OF REASON — THE ANTINOMIES 37 

definitions. In places he does plainly intimate that the phenomenally 
real is that which corresponds to the matter of our sense-perceptions or to 
our sensations. This would give some support to realism, for that 
which merely corresponds to our sensations may be distinct from them 
and does not necessarily cease to exist when it is not sensibly perceived. 
But in the sixth section of the Dialectic he holds consistently that the 
phenomenally real is the matter of our sense-perceptions or simply our 
sensations themselves. As for distant objects or past events, they are 
phenomenally real because of a possible connection between them and 
our present experience, because they would be or could be experienced 
under proper conditions. This is good pragmatic doctrine as against 
the realist. There remain those ultimate objects, but we may reiterate 
that they are meaningless for the problem Kant is here discussing. They 
are not the objects that realism itself would recognize in this connection 
at any rate. Throughout this section Kant refuses to separate subject 
from object, datum from meaning. 

Forced to classify Kant just here, we might, then, say that he is 
neither a realist nor an idealist. He deals with objects, reals, which are 
neither independent Dinge an sich nor yet subjective ideas. It is sig- 
nificant how modernly scientific is his attitude toward these objects of 
possible experience. He treats them as do the natural sciences — neither 
realistically nor idealistically, but just as objects dependent upon the 
constitution of our experience itself. He says once more: 

Perception which gives to a concept its material embodiment, is the only 
test of actuality. But we can, nevertheless, in advance of the perception of an 
object, and consequently in a relatively a priori fashion, know the existence of 
the object in case the thing in question is connected with any of our per- 
ceptions according to the principle of the empirical synthesis of phenomena. 
For then the existence of the thing is linked with our percepts in a possible 
experience, and by virtue of our general principles we can pass from our actual 
perception to the thing in question by a series of possible experiences. Thus 
we may recognize the existence of a magnetic substance pervading all matter, 
by virtue of our perception of the magnetic attraction of iron, although our 
immediate perception of the magnetic matter is impossible for us in consequence 
of the constitution of our sense organs. For in consequence of the laws of 
sensation and of the context of our perceptions, we should come directly to 
observe the magnetic matter were our organs fine enough. But the form of 
our possible experience has no dependence on the mere coarseness of our actual 
sense organs. And thus, just so far as perception and its supplementation by 
virtue of our empirical laws together suffice, so far extends our knowledge of 
the existence of things. But unless we begin with actual experience, and 



38 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

unless we proceed according to the laws of the empirical connection in experi- 
ence, we vainly seek to guess or to investigate the existence of anything. 1 

The pragmatist could ask no more forceful statement than this of his 
fundamental proposition that all facts, truths, existences must ulti- 
mately be experiential, using the term experience in all its organic 
implications; that experience itself is our datum and our only datum; 
that non-temporal units are a fiction; that in our effort to give a coherent 
account of the reality of a thing, or of the truth of a thing, we can go no 
farther than to state how far we can use it, what we can do with it, what 
it means for us; that so far as a thing is socialized we call it an object of 
knowledge; that the real for us is just what we find it to be. Was 
fruchtbar ist, allein ist wahr. 

1 Mahaffy, 2d ed., p. 273. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 

In the section on the "Ipleal of Reason" particularly the conception 
of postulating is handled in a manner pretty faithfully pragmatic, and 
the argument is not weakened by his shifting from appearance to mean- 
ingless things-in-themselves as in the discussion of the antinomies 
preceding. Our concern now is to see the role that postulates play for 
scientific purposes, in our everyday workaday world. The point is to 
see whether he does not recognize the purposive, instrumental character 
of our thinking. It is not merely that we can have no ideal moral world 
without certain postulates, but that we can have no kind of world without 
them, and that the verification of these ideas or postulates consists pre- 
cisely in the fact that we must have them to make understandable and 
worth while the actual world in which we live. Kant practically 
reminds us that we have certain ideas, purposes, relations — not merely 
in a moral sense, but in a scientific sense. Our world of daily thought 
and transaction holds together because it includes these. So much is 
fact. He is as certain of this as he was of the existence of mathematics 
and physics as bodies of knowledge. Hence these ideas are justified, 
vindicated. This is a not unjust paraphrase and summary of the 
entire section. 

Incidentally, again, Kant here differentiates his system from idealism, 
as the latter follows the tradition of Plato. He says emphatically: 
"Reason can give us none but pragmatic laws of free action for the 
attainment of the objects recommended to us by the senses, and never 
pure laws determined entirely a priori." 1 With this should be taken an 
earlier utterance to the same point: "What to us is an ideal was in 
Plato's language an Idea of a Divine Mind, an individual object present 
to its pure intuition, the most perfect of every kind of possible beings, and 
the archetype of all phenomenal objects. Without soaring so high, we 
have to admit that human reason contains not only ideas, but ideals also, 
which though they have not, like those of Plato, creative, yet have 
certainly practical power (as regulative principles) and form the basis of 
the possible perfection of certain acts." 2 Kant proceeds in endless 
repetition to show the futility of trying to construct reality from pure 
concepts in the old rationalistic way. He has demonstrated the 
weakness of the ontological argument, the physico-theological argument, 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 642. 2 Ibid., p. 460. 

39 



40 

and of all theology based on speculative principles of reason. Some of 
these expressions are pertinent for other purposes, but just here their 
scientific application is the issue. He says: "I maintain, accordingly, 
that transcendental ideas ought never to be employed as constitutive. 
They have, however, a most admirable and indispensably necessary 
regulative use, in directing the understanding to a certain aim." 1 He 
practically says with the pragmatist that we are striving constantly for 
the unification of our knowledge and experience. He points out plainly 
the instrumental character of every common scientific concept. "We 
must confess that pure earth, pure water, pure air, are hardly to be met 
with. Nevertheless we require the concepts of these in order to be able 
to determine properly the share which belongs to every one of these 
natural causes in phenomena." 2 Natural philosophers thus make use 
of concepts from reason "to explain the mutual chemical workings of 
matter. The hypothetical use of reason, resting on ideas as prob- 
lematical concepts, is thus at work constantly in science to introduce 
unity into the particulars of knowledge." 3 Unity, that is practical 
workability, is the very touchstone of the truth of these rules. Kant 
emphasizes the impossibility of changing such scientific rules into 
transcendental principles of reason. They are all tentative, subject to 
revision. He warns us that philosophers have unconsciously forgotten 
to keep this distinction and "the transcendental presupposition is con- 
cealed in their principles in the cleverest way." 4 He mentions mani- 
foldness, variety, and unity as mere ideas for the guidance of reason 
in its empirical progress, "heuristic principles in the elaboration of 
experience." 5 Once more these dynamical principles (and here dynami- 
cal gets its true significance in Kant's thought) are falsely contrasted 
with constitutive, mathematical principles, but that is not the point. 
The point is that certain concepts or principles may be and must be used 
as scientific maxims in our progress toward systematical unity. It should 
be emphasized, at the cost of whatever repetition, that Kant is specific 
as to the scientific, purposive, hypothetical nature of these ideas of 
reason. They are "heuristic not ostensive." They enable us to make 
inquiries of nature and go forward. They do not afford an answer all 
ready made. The latter, says Kant, would be the reverse of scientific 
method. To suppose that by means of these ideas we could have 
knowledge of real objects in the way of definite correspondence would 
be to dispense with the use of reason or to turn its activity in a wrong 

1 Mueller's trans., 518. 

2 Ibid., p. 519. 3 Ibid., p. 520. 4 ibid., p. 524. s ibid., p. 533. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 4 1 

direction. The dogmatist who assumes by pure a priori speculations to 
demonstrate the unity a,nd immateriality of the soul, or the origin of all 
things in God's intelligence, is starting at the wrong end. He is turning 
away from pure empirical investigation, or he merely twists empirical 
facts to correspond with the results of his a priori reasoning. He 
imposes upon nature his external system of teleology and prevents 
himself from rinding out the real nature of its unity. His argument 
moves in a circle, assuming the very thing it sets out to prove. 

While Kant recognizes the need of certain ideas to direct and sys- 
tematize experience, he breaks again with the pragmatist in regarding 
experience itself as inadequate for their realization or verification. Yet 
he practically proceeds to verify them or deduce them just as he has 
deduced his more certain categories. His "deduction" of these ideas 
illustrates the pragmatic notion of truth. Such concepts, ideas of the 
speculative reason, have "a schema to which no object, not even a 
hypothetical one, corresponds directly, but which seems only to represent 
to ourselves indirectly other objects through their relation to those 
ideas, and according to their systematic unity." 1 After all that he has 
said in criticism of the three transcendental ideas — the psychological, 
cosmological, and theological — his real deduction of them consists in 
showing that our experience is better arranged and improved by means 
of them than without them. It is significant here that he reiterates and 
illustrates what he has already indicated in his "Schematism of the 
Categories," namely, that such concepts as substance, reality, and even 
causation "have no meaning, unless they are used to make the empirical 
knowledge of an object possible. They may be used to explain the pos- 
sibility of things in the world of sense, but not to explain the possibil- 
ity of a universe itself, because such an hypothesis is outside the world 
and could never be an object of possible experience." 2 Kant is merely 
extending his schematism over the whole field of ideas and practically 
vindicating the ideas of reason on the same level with his necessary 
categories, namely, by their cogency in practical working. In the 
words of DeLaguna: 

They are never realized in any experience; that is to say, no analysis of a 
given experience can reveal them as verified in it. Yet they are essential to 
thought; for it is through their use that given experience becomes organized 
into the larger unity of experience as a whole. Their kinship with pragmatic 
postulates thus appears upon their face. Kant seems to say of them what the 

1 Ibid., p. 538. 
3 Ibid,, p. 544. 



42 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY 

pragmatist would say of all conceptions — that while they are never completely 
satisfied by any application of them, yet they serve to bring unity to our 
thought and in this service if in no other find their sanction. 1 

Thus Kant would use the idea of the soul not in the Cartesian sense 
of substance (res) but merely as an instrumental hypothesis. In the 
Paralogisms of Pure Reason he has clearly shown that it is by confusion 
of the logical subject with a real substrate that the false rationalistic 
demonstration of the soul's substantiality proceeds. The idea of the 
soul as an unconditioned unity is not a matter of proof or disproof. We 
can no more infer from the ego of which we are conscious, that is from 
our one and identical thought, the existence of the soul as a substance 
than we can infer a soul of the world from the unity of the universe. Yet 
thought does appear as one and identical. That is the condition of its 
very existence. The possibility of the corporeal world presupposes 
the thinking ego, the transcendental unity of apperception. All the 
categories, all the forms of thought, involve this as their first condition. 
They all have meaning and value because they are the means which 
produce the unity of consciousness. 

Kant schematizes the soul, as it were. In his same heavy way he 
says it is " the concept of the empirical unity of all thought. Its object is 
merely to find principles of systematic unity for the explanation of the 
phenomena of the soul." 2 He is explicit in stressing the psychological 
character of this idea. His expressions recall the statement of a leading 
contemporary psychologist that, in this connection, the soul as an entity 
is as extinct as the dodo. Yet even in legal science today we deal with 
souls — with individuals. So for purposes of unity — Kant would seem 
to say — all the grounds of explanation must be traced to one single 
principle. As if to guard against misconstruction he repeats: "It is 
quite permissible to represent to ourselves the soul as simple, in order, 
according to this idea, to use the complete and necessary unity of all 
the faculties of the soul, but to assume the soul as a simple substance 
(which is a transcendent concept) would be a proposition not only 
indemonstrable but purely arbitrary and rash." 3 As Windelband well 
expresses it, "It is an heuristic principle for investigating the inter- 
connections of the psychical life." 4 In disclaiming in this place any 
consideration of its spiritual nature, Kant intimates that such a reference 
would immediately, by contrast with the corporeal, lift the concept out 
of its relations of experience and render it meaningless. This actualistic 

1 Op. cit., p. 82. 3 ibid., p. 618. 

3 Mueller's trans., p. 548. 4 History of Phil., p. 549. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 43 

theory of the soul, to use Paulsen's term, is really a dynamic element 
in Kant's treatment. "The soul is not a mere dead substrate, not an 
unchanging substance like an atom, but pure energy, spontaneous energy 
of knowing and willing." 1 This view was lost or obscured for a long 
time and its revival in the pragmatic movement is no insignificant 
element of contact between Kant's philosophy and the latter movement. 

The second regulative idea of speculative reason, the universe, is a 
functional concept, as Kant uses it, for dealing with nature in general. 
We must have a rule for dealing with the totality of the series of phe- 
nomena. "The absolute totality of the series of these conditions 
determining the derivation of all their members, is an idea which, 
though never brought to perfection in the empirical use of reason, may 
yet become a rule, telling us how to proceed in the explanation of given 
phenomena." 2 The universe as such an idea cannot be treated as an 
object of knowledge, in the Kantian sense. He has already shown in the 
antinomies that when the universe is treated in this abstract manner 
propositions mutually contradictory can be affirmed of it. It is evidently 
the world of human experience, not a great external fabric of reality 
existing in its own independence, that Kant has here in mind. 

The third idea of reason — God — as a regulative or functional idea, 
"can always benefit reason and yet never injure it." 3 It serves "to 
connect the things of the world according to teleological laws and thus 
to arrive at their greatest systematical unity." 4 This reminds one of 
expressions of James, except for certain anthropomorphic characters in 
the latter's view of God which Kant could not accept. Kant says: 
" Reason can have no object here but its own formal rule in the extension 
of its empirical use, but can never aim at extension beyond all limits of 
its empirical application." 5 The idea of God, in other words, is plainly 
a scientific hypothesis for empirical satisfaction. Kant would seem to 
say that we need the idea of God as the chemist needs his atom or the 
physicist his idea of force. Atom, force, and God are all speculations, 
but they are necessary. Like Joseph Landor, Kant would hold that 
the presumption is in favor of the simplest hypothesis, and he fails to 
get any unity in his cosmos without the God idea. He has exposed and 
explained away the rationalistic fallacy of the ontological proof which 
would establish existence from mere concepts, of the physico-theological 
argument which results in a mere "Architect of the World," and of the 

1 Immanuel Kant, p. 393. 

3 Mueller's trans., p. 550. 

3 Ibid., p. s 54. 4 ibid. s Ibid. 



44 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

cosmological proof which involves a petitio principii, seeking the " first 
cause" of all that is contingent in an " absolutely necessary existence"; 
but, used as a functional idea this concept affords a needed motive for 
scientific investigation of groups of phenomena. To assume God as 
proven in the old sense is "to imagine the efforts of our reason as ended 
when we have really dispensed with its employment." 1 It would be 
just the reverse of true scientific method. 

If I begin with a supreme ordaining Being, as the ground of all things, the 
unity of nature is really surrendered as being quite foreign to the nature of 
things, purely contingent, and not to be known from its own general laws. 
Thus arises a vicious circle by our presupposing what in reality ought to have 
been proved. But if we use the idea as a regulative principle for the sys- 
tematical unity in a teleological connection according to general laws — the 
principle can enlarge the use of reason with reference to experience. 2 
We are not here concerned to add his moral proof but merely to see his 
justification of this idea as a practical postulate. Not only is he prag- 
matic in the adoption of this postulate but he finds it verified in its 
efficient working, precisely as the pragmatist would contend. He adds: 
"As much of design, therefore, as you discover in the world, according 
to that principle, so much of confirmation has the legitimacy of your 
idea received." 3 In the Canon of Pure Reason Kant recurs to this idea 
in words and illustrations most significant for this comparative study. 
The point is slightly confused by the contrast of practical with doctrinal 
belief, both of which would fall legitimately under the pragmatic con- 
ception of practical. The existence of God is there assigned to the 
category of the doctrinal. The discussion, however, deserves, from the 
standpoint of this study, a careful analysis. 

Before we continue the consideration of this particular hypothesis, two 
points should be noted in Kant's treatment in this chapter — the limita- 
tion of the notion of truth to single judgments and his stand against the 
conception of truth as a mere copying relation. In both of these his 
handling of the matter is strikingly similar to expressions and illustra- 
tions of James. Kant had spoken in the preceding chapter of the possi- 
bility of a usable idea which does not, in the ordinary sense, correspond 
to an object. He now affords a better, and a decidedly pragmatic, 
conception of what real correspondence with an object must be to make 
sense. Kant does say, to be sure, that "truth depends upon agreement 
with its object," 4 but by clear illustration he interprets agreement in a 
sense more nearly related to that of the pragmatist than to that of the 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 554. 

2 Ibid., p. 556. 3 Ibid., p. 561. * Ibid., p. 658. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 45 

realist or the idealist. He has been showing, just as pragmatists in 
answer to criticisms have shown, the absurdity of holding a thing true 
because it satisfies some individual, subjective need or inclination. 
He says: 

If it has its ground in the peculiar character of the subject only, it is called 
persuasion. If the judgment is valid for everybody, then the ground of it is 

objectively sufficient and the holding of it true is called conviction 

Truth depends on agreement with the object, and with regard to it the 

judgments of every understanding must agree with each other An 

external criterion, therefore, as to whether our holding a thing to be true be 
conviction or only persuasion consists in the possibility of communicating it, 
and finding its truth to be valid for the reason of every man. 1 

We may compare this with Schiller, "To be really certain, a truth must 
show more than an individual value. It must acquire social recognition 
and change into a common property." 2 

The character of the agreement Kant has in mind is vitally significant. 
It is difficult in this whole passage to read into his meaning the ter- 
minology of Hegel, who describes the idea as running over into the object, 
of the notion as finding itself again in objectivity, and of an eternal 
system of notions built up as absolute truth. Far less can we find here 
the meaning of the out-and-out realist. But let us first take James's 
illustration of the agreement of ideas with their objects : 

According to the general view a true idea must copy its reality. Like 
other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the usual experience. 
Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and 
think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy 
of its dial. But your idea of its works (unless you are a clock-maker) is much 
less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality. 
Even though it should shrink to the mere word works, that word still serves 
you truly and when you speak of the time-keeping function of the clock, or of 
the spring's elasticity, it is hard to see what your ideas can copy. Wherein 
stands the truth of our assertion that the thing there on the wall is a clock ? 
We use it as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture by it. The verification 
of the assumption here means its leading to no frustration or contradiction. 
Verifiability of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification. 
For one truth process completed there are a million in our lives that function 
in this state of nascency. They turn us toward direct verification; lead us 

into the surroundings of the objects they envisage To agree, in the 

widest sense, with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to 
it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to 
handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed 
with it.3 

1 Ibid., p. 658. a Humanism, p. 58. 3 Pragmatism, p. 213. 



.46 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

In accordance with this it would appear that there are only single 
truths. There is no absolute truth written with bold capital letters. 
Now Kant declares: "I cannot maintain anything, that is, affirm it as a 
judgment, necessarily valid for everybody except it work conviction." 1 
If it does work conviction in its communication and be seen as valid for 
the reason of every man, " there is at least a presumption that the ground 
of the agreement of all judgments rests upon the common ground, 
namely, on the object with which they all agree, and thus proves the 
truth of the judgment." 2 In the pages immediately following he gives 
an illuminating illustration of this kind of agreement with object. 
Trowing, believing, knowing are treated as degrees in the process of 
adopting and verifying a hypothesis. Trowing is a surmise in the face 
of a problem. "It is to hold true with the consciousness that it is 
insufficient both subjectively and objectively." 3 Believing, an attitude 
to which we are driven by a problem — driven for a practical solution of 
some kind — occurs "if the holding true is sufficient subjectively, but is 

held to be insufficient objectively While, if it is sufficient both 

subjectively and objectively, it is called knowing. "* Now as to the real 
nature of this objective sufficiency follows an illustration that reads like a 
citation from one of the pragmatists. To accomplish ends which we are 
obliged to propose to ourselves "certain conditions are hypothetically 
necessary," or, as we should say, certain hypotheses are needed. The 
physician called suddenly to a case of illness must do something for the 
patient. He does not yet know the sickness. He looks at the symptoms 
and judges, because he knows nothing better, that it looks like phthisis. 
"His belief, according to his own judgment, is contingent only, and he 
knows that another might form a better judgment. It is this kind of 
contingent belief which, nevertheless, supplies a ground for the actual 
employment of means to certain actions, which I call pragmatic belief."* 
Here we have not only the word correctly used but the situation just as 
the pragmatist likes to sketch it — a problem calling for activity, necessi- 
tating a hypothesis, a belief growing out of the conditions and verifying 
itself — its truth, its agreement with its object — in its successful grappling 
with the conditions and solving the problem. Correspondence with 
object has, then, for Kant, by plain implication at least, the pragmatic 
significance of response to human needs, the keeping-step with our 
advance in knowledge and experience. 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 659. 

2 Ibid., p. 658. 4 Ibid. 

3 Ibid., p. 659. s Ibid., p. 661. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 47 

And now, returning to our direct application, it is precisely thus that 
Kant proceeds to verify the idea of God as a scientific postulate. It is 
the usefulness of this idea as a working hypothesis for the investigation 
of nature that furnishes its vindication. 

The unity of design is so important a condition of the application of reason 
to nature that I cannot ignore it, especially as experience supplies so many 
examples of it. Of that unity of design, however, I know no other condition 
which would make it a guidance in my study of nature, but the supposition 
that a supreme intelligence has ordered all things according to the wisest ends. 
As a condition, therefore, of, it may be a contingent but not unimportant end, 
namely, in order to have a guidance in the investigation of nature, it is necessary 
to admit a wise author of the world. The result of my experience confirms the 
usefulness of this supposition so many times, while nothing decisive can be 
adduced against it, that I am really saying far too little if I call my acceptance 
of it a mere opinion, and it may be said, even with regard to these theoretical 
matters, that I firmly believe in God. 1 

Even here, however, in the most obviously pragmatic portion of the 
Critique of Pure Reason, there is a difference between Kant and the 
pragmatist that will not down. The very contrast throughout this 
section of constitutive and regulative principles involves a tacit reference 
on one side to a region of reality that has no abiding-place in true func- 
tional thinking. Kant wearies the reader with the affirmation and the 
proof that this ultimate region is not for us in our knowledge and makes 
contradiction and confusion in our philosophy. And that fact should 
have expelled it at once. But it is evident that, in Kant's thought, for 
some intelligible character or reality there may be constitutive thought 
not vouchsafed to phenomenal beings. 

The transcendental ideas have no constitutive, but only a regulative use; 
in other words their use is to direct all the operations of the understanding 
to one end or point of union. This point is indeed a mere idea or focus 
imaginarius, since it lies beyond the sphere of experience, and the conceptions 
of the understanding do not find their source in it; yet it serves to give to 
these conceptions the greatest possible unity combined with the most extended 
application. 2 

Now pragmatism must, to be consistent, insist that conceptual 
thought itself is directly related to science and human conduct. It 
comes to the same thing for knowledge, as Kant is concerned in his whole 
system to show, but pragmatism leaves no conceptual thought as it 
leaves no noumenal characters standing off in a separate region. More- 
over, as DeLaguna has pointed out, there is too much absolutism, after 

1 Ibid., p. 663. 2 Meiklejohn's trans., p. 395. 



48 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

all, involved in these regulative ideas of reason to satisfy the prag- 
matist. They seem for the most part to be as fixed, in Kant's con- 
ception, as the categories themselves. There is the same lack of evolu- 
tion, of change to meet changing requirements, in them as in the table 
of categories. Kant expresses with no uncertain sound this lack of 
evolution in even his most scientific moods: "The greatest and perhaps 
the only advantage of all philosophy of pure reason seems therefore to 
be negative only; because it serves, not as an organon for the extension, 
but as a discipline for the limitation of its domain, and instead of dis- 
covering truth, it only claims the modest merit of preventing error." 1 
Elsewhere, of course, he intimates that his purpose in "limiting the 
domain " of pretentious knowledge is precisely to make it a positive factor 
for future scientific progress — a factor that may be used with certain 
confidence just because of its restriction within limits. He goes a long 
way back to get a running start for a good jump. His purpose is pro- 
gressive, scientific. But it remains true that throughout his tedious 
investigation of knowledge and in the influence which he directly trans- 
mitted to his disciples this negative character of philosophy was para- 
mount. In this connection James is correct in holding that since 
Kant's time the word "philosophy" has come to stand for mental and 
moral speculation far more than for physical theories. 

To know the actual peculiarities of the world we are born into is surely as 
important as to know what makes worlds anyhow abstractly possible. Yet 
this latter knowledge has been treated by many since Kant's time as the only 
knowledge worthy of being called philosophical. Common men feel the 
question, "What is nature like ?" to be as meritorious as the Kantian question, 
"How is nature possible?" 2 

It is the extension of knowledge that is of vital concern to the 
pragmatist. While this charge of James must be conceded against 
Kantianism historically — as a methodological influence — we must 
reiterate that it was precisely the desire to forward sure and certain 
knowledge that led Kant forth at all on his memorable intellectual 
excursion. He was wrong only as to the method of securing certain 
knowledge and as to the real scope of that knowledge. 

Kant seems to be fully aware of this serious limitation to his system 
when he turns toward the practical use of pure reason. Particularly 
when he faces the problems of the moral life does he realize the need of 
something more dynamic. There are, as Royce has said, many devious 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 638. 

3 Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 14, 15. 



THE IDEAL OF REASON 49 

paths in Kant. He is not always consistent. Ward's saying that the 
three Critiques must be united into one is pertinent here. Dewey has, 
a, propos of this thought, reminded us that to give Kant's elements of 
thought any such worth as he himself wished to attach to them we 
must take them in only one of the two senses in which he uses them. 
They must be understood as "regulating, making experience different 
in a determinative sense and manner. Taken in the sense of a static, 
immanent, fixed endowment, and therefore making no determinate 
difference to any one experience as compared with another they are 
confusing and have led to serious misconceptions in later philosophy." 1 . 
In getting too much necessity and universality "we mythologize reality 
and deprive the life of thoughtful endeavor of its ground for being." 2 
To summarize Kant's treatment of the regulative ideas of reason, 
and particularly his section on the "Ideal of Reason," we find that he 
adumbrates, if he does not definitely formulate, the current pragmatic 
conception of mental growth, of all human progress, by postulating. 
He is less hampered here than elsewhere by the dogmatic heritage of 
things-in-themselves. Before approaching specifically the significance 
and proof of his postulates for the moral life, even in this first Critique, 
he shows that for the theoretical reason itself, for the demands of our 
common life, for the interests of straightforward scientific progress, we 
must adopt hypotheses, and that these find their justification and validity 
in their actual power of introducing simplicity, harmony, continuity. 
This is true of the actual world in which we labor. It is true of the man 
in the streets, the man at his daily tasks. The soul or ego, the world and 
God are instrumental ideas, having their significance, and the only proof 
of which they are capable, in their usefulness, in their indispensable 
character for the unification of thought and life. They fall short of 
pragmatic postulates only in the fact that they seem, like all of Kant's 
concepts and postulates, to be fixed and final for all time and all 
conditions. 

1 Influence of Darwin on Phil., p. 207. 

2 Ibid. 



KANT'S TELEOLOGY VERSUS MECHANICAL CAUSALITY 

One phase of Kant's formulation of the antinomies that affords 
significant comparisons with pragmatic attitudes is his statement of the 
problem of mechanism and teleology. He touches it rather lightly in 
the first Critique and resumes the discussion in the Critique of Judgment. 
In both cases he hints at its proper solution by the substitution of a both 
and consideration for an either or. He comes upon the problem in his 
transition from the transcendental mathematical ideas to the transcen- 
dental dynamical. His both and assumes the very burdens which the 
pragmatist would wish to avoid, but its significance is in indicating Kant's 
dissatisfaction with a closed system that leaves little or nothing to 
purposive human activity. Moreover it bears superficial resemblances 
to similar discussions in pragmatic literature. Kant seeks refuge in the 
admission of an intelligible cause as well as a phenomenal, in intellectual 
perception as well as sensuous. Logically carried out, this would 
involve all the old dualism and has no proper place in pragmatic thinking. 
Kant really has two worlds, while pragmatism would limit the solution 
of this and of all problems to one and the same order. Shall all nature 
phenomena be mechanically explained or do certain products require a 
teleological explanation ? Kant says there would be a contradiction if 
we should use both maxims as constitutive principles, that is, if we should 
hold that the production of material things is possible only on the laws 
of mechanical necessity, yet at the same time that some material things 
can be produced only on the causal law of ultimate objects. But, he 
thinks, there is no contradiction if we agree to regard all phenomena as 
coming under the principle of mechanism assumed as the basis of scientific 
investigation, yet still retain the principle of ultimate objects as a guide 
to reflection, because the organism of the part can be explained only by 
a consideration of the aim of the whole. 

This might seem to be in harmony with pragmatic teaching regarding 
the conflict of postulates. Pragmatism holds that postulates are just 
methodological maxims of our Welt-Betrachtung. Natural science for 
its purposes demands that mechanical causality be carried out purely. 
So Kant says: "The intelligible has been shown to be useless for the 
explanation of phenomena." 1 Schiller admits a conflict here and fails 
to solve it further than to suggest, almost in Kant's own language, that 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 454. 

50 



kant's teleology versus mechanical causality 51 

we may assume the teleological treatment for a general principle of re- 
flection upon the whole of nature and subsume mechanism as a scientific 
method under it. After showing that teleology is an indispensable 
postulate in human thinking because the conformity between nature and 
human nature is the only key to the arcana of life which we possess, 
Schiller adds: 

The ideal of scientific explanation is mechanical, and this is taken to be 
anti-teleological. So far, therefore, teleology remains a postulate which it is 
not possible to carry through and to render an axiom of biological or physical 
research. For in the first place the anti-teleological bias of natural science is 
largely due to the perverse use professing teleologists have made of their postu- 
late. Instead of treating it as a method whereby to understand the complex 
relations of reality, they have made it into an argos logos which shut off all 
further possibilities of investigation, by ascribing everything to a "divine pur- 
pose" and then in order to shirk the laborious task of tracing the divine 
intelligence in the world, adding the suicidal "rider" that the divine purpose 
was inscrutable. 1 

James holds that teleology and mechanism do not necessarily 
contradict each other. To say that they do would be equivalent to 
saying, "My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is 
impossible that they should have been produced by machinery." Now 
Kant is entirely in accord with these thinkers as to the non-interference 
of the teleological with the course of scientific investigation, with such 
uniformities and regularities as it is possible for us to discover. He says : 

This regulative principle, however, does not exclude the admission of an 
intelligible cause not comprehended in the series, when we come to the pure 
use of reason (with reference to ends or aims) . For in this case, an intelligible 
cause only means the transcendental and, to us, unknown ground of the 
possibility of the sensuous series in general, and the existence of this, inde- 
pendent of all conditions of the sensuous series, and in reference to it uncondi- 
tionally necessary, is by no means opposed to the unlimited contingency of the 
former, nor to the never-ending regressus in the series of empirical conditions. 3 

Evidently Kant would not impede the course of scientific progress with 
an argos logos. 

If Kant and the pragmatist, then, both hold to the teleological as a 
general principle of reflection upon the course of nature, without inter- 
fering with mechanical necessity in the domain of scientific research, 
what is the difference between them? Just the difference between 
the static and the dynamic, so the pragmatist would answer. For the 

1 Personal Idealism, "Axioms as Postulates," p. 119. 
3 Mueller's trans., p. 456. 



52 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

latter mechanical causalty itself, with all other categories, has its genesis 
in the purposive and teleological activity of human thinking. It is 
penetrated through and through with end-striving. There is therefore 
no sharp difference between the two maxims or postulates. Nature, so 
far as we have proved it, is sufficiently adapted to our thoughts and 
wishes and sufficiently anthropomorphic to be mechanized. Because it 
is mechanical it "works into our hands." But Kant holds that there is 
only an accidental fitness of relation between our categories and experi- 
ence from external sources. For a Godlike intellect, an intuitive under- 
standing, to whom form and content alike were properly a priori, this 
conformity would be not accidental but necessary. 

That intelligible cause, therefore, with its causality, is outside the series, 
though its effects are to be found in the series of empirical conditions. In its 
intelligible character, however, the same subject would have to be considered 
free from all influence of sensibility, and from all determination through 
phenomena; and as in it, so far as it is a noumenon, nothing happens, and no 
change which requires dynamical determination of time, and therefore no 
connection with phenomena as causes, can exist, that active being would so 
far be quite independent and free in its acts from all natural necessity which 
can exist in the world of sense only. 1 

The mundus intelligibilis makes a gap once more between him and 
the functional attitude. In order to have design in his otherwise 
necessitated world he must have practically another set of categories 
than those which suffice for the mechanical order. But this would put 
all the design over into the intelligible world, and Kant fails to realize 
that there would be no room left for teleology in the order in which we 
have our human thinking and work to do. As Bergson puts it, "there 
would be nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe." 2 
We should be merely working out a program already prepared and 
completed. Indeed, logically and consistently carried out, this would 
seem to commit even the intelligible order or God himself to a plan long 
since completed and closed. The noumenal order itself would be "the 
same yesterday, today, and forever." The more serious consequences, 
however, would seem to fall to us in the limitations placed upon our 
order, in the consequent loss of our social responsibility — the highest 
dignity and inspiration that pertain to human beings. This is a cardinal 
error of all absolutism and comes to much more than the pragmatic 
conflict of postulates. 

1 Mueller's trans., p. 438. 
3 Creative Evolution, p. 37. 



KANT S TELEOLOGY VERSUS MECHANICAL CAUSALITY 53 

The problem carried over into the field of ethics as that of determin- 
ism and indeterminism offers the same comparisons and the same crux 
of difference. Kant again formulates the question in the manner of 
antinomies. Pragmatism also treats the matter as a conflict of postu- 
lates. In both cases a both and is substituted for an either or 
consideration. Kant seeks a solution in adding to the causal necessity 
of the phenomenal world the freedom of intelligible characters. Prag- 
matism seeks the solution in one world or one order and finds it by giving 
to our thought and life wider scope. Kant may be called pragmatic in 
his recognition of the dilemma in which his closed system leaves him and 
in artificially blazing a path out at all costs. His necessity must be 
harmonized with freedom if morality is to be saved. He parts from the 
pragmatist in having resort to his assumed noumenal order: 

Our problem was whether freedom is contradictory to natural causality in 
one and the same action; this we have sufficiently answered by showing that 
freedom may have relation to a very different kind of conditions from those of 
nature, so that the law of the latter does not affect the former, and both may 
exist independent of, and undisturbed by, each other. 1 

Schiller thinks the problem is not insoluble if we avoid " carrying the 
assumption out of the realm of methodology into that of metaphysics." 
But this helps us very little, for to leave a gap yawning between meta- 
physics and other fields of mental activity is precisely what pragmatism 
protests against and is inconsistent with its whole theory of reality. 
James thinks the whole bogey can be downed if we rid ourselves of the 
absolutist conception of a "block- universe" and our antipathy to the 
idea of chance. In his notable illustration of alternative paths leading 
from the university to his home he declares: "What a hollow outcry is 
this against a chance which, if it were present to us, we could by no 
character whatever distinguish from a rational necessity." 2 There is no 
such thing as 

absolute accident, something irrelevant to the rest of the world. What divides 
us into possibility men and anti-possibility men is different faiths or postulates 
of rationality. To this man the world seems more rational with possibilities 
excluded, and talk as we will about having to yield to evidence, what makes us 
monists or pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some 
sentiment like this.s 

James concedes too much, however, in resting the matter wholly on 
sentiment. We do not minimize sentiment but just here we are asking 

1 Ibid. ) p. 451. 

3 Will-to-Believe, p. 157. 3 Ibid., p. 153. 



54 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

what attitude toward reality will keep sentiment within the bounds of 
rationality. Pragmatists prefer a world that affords possibilities, 
purposes, decisions which help to make changes, to alter reality in the 
direction in which we want to go, because no other kind of world gives 
moral tone and dignity. The conception of a "block-universe" is 
intolerable because it seems unreasonable. Temporal being is not 
merely the appearance of an Eternal Reality immutable and timeless. 
Being, change, activity are realities in the fullest sense. Bergson has 
suggested that any sort of finalism which assumes that all is given 
becomes after all only an inverted mechanism. Time and its changes 
lose their worth and disappear before a "mind seated at the center of 
things." 1 Hermann gives voice to the same thought: "In the last 
resort the freedom of the human agent under such an eternally con- 
ceived omnipotent governor of the universe is just as illusory as under a 
frankly naturalistic scheme of physical law." 2 For the pragmatist we 
as agents have something to do with changing, unifying, and ameliorating 
our world. This is what is involved in a pluralistic universe, although 
the pragmatist would concede that the world and our knowledge of it 
move constantly toward an ever-greater unity. We are not now con- 
cerned with the religious aspects of the problem, but evidently pragma- 
tism has room for religious hypotheses similar to Kant's postulates of 
the practical reason. The difference again roots back in Kant's rational- 
istic background. The God of James, for instance, would seem to be a 
guiding and sympathizing personality working for good and not respon- 
sible for the evil in the world, certainly not indifferent to it. He is a 
kind of First among Peers, as indeterminate as we are. Kant's Godly 
Urwesen inhabits realms unknown to us in its being. When we seek to 
approach him in teleological ways we think merely of his relations to our 
world, not of his own spiritual characteristics. We can approach the 
latter only by analogy. God's understanding is intuitive while ours is 
discursive. "His knowledge must be perception, not thought, for 
thought always involves limitations." 3 Kant fails to escape from the 
problem of the two worlds. The placing of all real determination of 
values in this noumenal world involved consequences which he failed to 
realize. In conceding to the mechanical order all human action which 
we can know , in making our phenomenal experience as utterly subject to 
the laws of matter and motion as is the path of a billiard ball, he virtually 

1 Op. cit., p. 40. 

2 Eucken and Bergson, p. 143. 

3 Watson, Selections, p. 37. 



55 

surrendered to the "lower categories philosophy" which he wanted to 
refute. His forced resort to a noumenal order to save freedom either 
from mechanical causality on one side, or from pleasure-pain motives on 
the moral side, was a capitulation of all realized or realizable values from 
which further thinking should have saved him. He does preserve these 
supreme values by proceeding to think and act as if the two worlds were 
one, as if we were not necessitated in our own world. Deeper reflection 
should have revealed to him that the obligation so to think and act 
exposes the merely tentative, human, experimental nature of "the lower 
categories" falsely proven to be fixed and changeless, and consequently 
leaves no insuperable barrier between the methods of our workaday, 
scientific lives and our higher interests. 

It is one of the fruits of pragmatism or of the dynamic conception of 
reality to show the futility of endeavoring to prescribe to life ends 
completely formulated and understood in the human sense of the word. 
In Bergson's incisive words: 

To speak of an end is to think of a pre-existing model which has only to be 
realized. It is to suppose that all is given, and that the future can be read in 
the present. It is to believe that life, in its movement and in its entirety, goes 
to work like our intellect, which is only a motionless and fragmentary view of 
life, and which naturally takes its stand outside of time. Life, on the contrary, 
progresses and endures in time. Of course, when once the road has been 
traveled, we can glance over it, mark its direction, note this in psychological 
terms, and speak as if there had been pursuit of an end. But, of the road 
which was going to be traveled, the human mind could have nothing to say, 
for the road has been created pari passu with the act of traveling over it, being 
nothing but the direction of this act itself. At every instant, then, evolution 
must admit of a psychological interpretation which is, from our point of view, 
the best interpretation; but this explanation has neither value nor even 
significance except retrospectively. 1 

In ethical theory much energy has been expended in discussing 
whether the end of life or conduct be pleasure, happiness, or perfection, 
instead of having been given to the direct amelioration of life toward 
such standards as the actual conditions made imperative. The evolu- 
tionary hypothesis has made evident the fact that the moral life is not a 
set of conditions fixed for all time, but that it is constantly being deter- 
mined anew by fresh conditions and combinations which themselves help 
to determine the ends. We do not arbitrarily construct ideals. They 
are made by elements at work in experience. This is the effectual 
answer to Locke's query as to a mathematical formulation of morals 

1 Op. cit., p. si. 



56 

What could Locke in his day know of social justice as it presses upon 
the English or American conscience today? Just so with our wider 
problem of mechanism and teleology. If reality is a changing order, no 
theory of final causes can be accepted that mortgages the future. The 
needs and conditions of the growing order itself must help reconstruct the 
end so far as that is capable of statement in intellectual terms. It is our 
same problem ever repeated of not abstracting the intellect as a self- 
inclosed function but of recognizing its role as one of the factors in the 
more comprehensive reality. 



POSTULATES OF PRACTICAL REASON FOR THE MORAL 
AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 

In his consideration of the summum bonum as determining the 
ultimate aim of pure reason and in his postulates of the practical reason, 
Kant seems to realize the uselessnessof the fixed system he has elaborated, 
of the conception of experience "to which the speculative ideas have 
returned us," and turns to the practical use of reason to regain some 
of our lost ground and make progress in the direction of our real 
interests. Here, in reply to James, it appears that his deeper purpose 
from the beginning was intensely practical, whatever may have been the 
outcome in the first Critique. His desire evidently was, in explaining 
the nature of knowledge and trying to reconcile the two opposed schools 
of his day, to limit the pretenses of philosophy and thus clear the path 
for the practical postulates of conduct and religion. 

In the approach to this division of the subject several points and 
comparisons should be clarified, if possible. We have noted the frequent 
and common comparison of certain positions in James's Will-to-Believe 
and Other Essays with Kant's postulates of the practical reason as having 
the closest relationships. Yet it is just this aspect of pragmatism itself, 
as treated by James, that has received the most merciless criticism and 
that has been repudiated by some pragmatists themselves. Dewey 
has seemed to criticize the rather loose treatment by James of the 
satisfactions of the practical reason on the ground that they are confused 
or easily capable of confusion with the strictly scientific satisfactions to 
which ideas must be restricted if they are to stand the pragmatic test of 
truth as synonymous with workability. James is believed to have dealt 
too generously with the whole matter of verification and verifiability in 
regions not open to the application of scientific tests and standards. 
There are, of course, various types of pragmatism, and one is by no 
means committed to the proposition that all of James's positions and 
metaphorical illustrations are sound, in the effort to point out the 
functional elements concealed in Kant's system. But the criticism, for 
our essential purposes, deserves examination as an introduction to 
this chapter. 

The criticism offered may possibly be illustrated as follows: Truth, 
it is said, does not consist in a copying relation but in the workability of 
a concept or an idea for the satisfaction of needs or the attainment of 

57 



58 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

ends. But needs and ends are slippery terms and the satisfaction 
intended must be scientifically and accurately defined. To take a 
homely illustration, I may have an idea that a certain book much 
needed by me at the time of writing this paper is in an adjoining room. 
My belief that this particular book is there on the shelf is related to a 
definite problem, an intellectual need. The idea or belief is useless 
apart from the determinate experience which it indicates. The idea's 
verification will consist in my finding the book, turning to the accurate 
passage desired, and using it for the confirmation of my thought. This 
would be a case of " internal accord " and of strictly scientific verification. 
The idea that vaccination is the preventive of smallpox is true if it is 
verified in saving hundreds of people from the ravages of that disease, 
as attested by facts, statistics. Taking a historical illustration, Joan of 
Arc and others believed that she had seen white horses ridden by celestial 
warriors down through the ethereal spaces. The loose criterion of 
satisfaction as used by James might be thought to warrant the position 
that this belief was true, was verified in its consequences, in the 
satisfactory adjustments it helped to create in Joan of Arc's successful 
campaign for France. But, the criticism would run, a scientific test of 
the belief would necessitate an examination of the ground on which the 
horses were alleged to have stood, to the sifting of testimony, the securing 
of reliable witnesses, to all that is involved in Hume's classic criteria for 
evaluating an alleged miracle. A loose, unscientific application of this 
test of satisfaction-making efficacy would, it is said, open the door to the 
illusions and superstititions of the ages. It would be particularly facile 
in the hands of the Christian Scientist and the Spiritualist. 

Now, before we prosecute this alleged comparison between Kant's 
postulates and the Will-to-Believe, it is important to ask whether James 
would seriously countenance such a loose application of his thought. It 
should be noted again that, in the volume referred to, he carefully 
narrows and defines his case. Pascal's "wager" is not recommended 
except in cases of forced, living options. He does not advocate a mere 
subjectivism, or the giving credence to " unproved and unquestioned 
statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer." 1 He 
agrees with W. K. Clifford that this would be a desecration of belief and 
that "those bred in the rugged and manly school of science should feel 
like spewing such subjectivism out of their mouths." 2 He limits the case 
to conditions in which "our passional nature not only lawfully may, but 

1 The Will-to-Believe and Other Essays, p. 8. 

2 Ibid., p. 7. 



PRACTICAL REASON FOR THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 59 

must decide an option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual 
grounds; for to say, under such conditions, 'Do not decide, but leave the 
question open,' is itself a passionless decision — just like deciding yes or 
no — and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth." 1 The 
adoption of hypotheses under such conditions as these is the only device 
compatible with the purposive character of our thinking and conduct 
and is the only attitude possible for practical people who hold the 
optimistic attitude "that there is truth and that it is the destiny of our 
minds to attain it." 2 Such conditions and options are necessarily fast 
bound up with the problems of the moral and religious life. 

Now this is strikingly in harmony with Kant's fundamental feeling 
that by means of the practical reason, which is legislative for the will, 
we are dealing with genuine reality, with a kingdom of ends. The 
similarity is intensified by the fact that with Kant also this is a region 
where intellectual grounds fail us, while the absolute law of our moral 
life forces us to some decision. (We are not, of course, discussing the 
question whether Kant's own beliefs are essential to a moral life.) 
Kant feels profoundly that reality itself must be an order in conformity 
with ends, with the realization of ideals. As the pragmatist would say, 
it must be consistent with the purposive character of all human thinking. 

A closer analysis may, however, reveal that Kant is even more 
pragmatic and less subjectivistic in this matter than James. Our 
concern with the latter has been merely to give him a fair hearing. It is 
to be observed that for Kant's kingdom of ends the postulates of the 
practical reason are not optional hypotheses at all. They are postulates 
in the literal sense of the word — demands made by the moral nature. 
Modern men may not agree with Kant about these needs of the moral 
life. Some have expressed their disagreement. But that is another 
question. We are not discussing the grounds or the end of morality as 
a question on its own merits. Granted the moral and spiritual needs 
which Kant so earnestly felt, and his postulates meet the tests and 
verifications which the pragmatist would impose. Kant presents these 
needs and postulates both in his Canon of Pure Reason and in his Critique 
of Practical Reason. We need not burden the discussion with parallel 
expressions and quotations. We may note, incidentally, however, that 
there is some continuity between his deduction of the a priori categories 
of the Critique of Pure Reason and his justification of these postulates of 
the practical reason. In regard to the former he has shown that we 
construct our orderly experience in response to the demands of our own 

1 Ibid., p. 11. 2 Ibid., p. 12. 



60 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

nature. In the second Critique we learn that certain ideas, while they 
are not objects of demonstrative knowledge, are requisite for the needs 
of the moral order. It is not merely that for optional courses we may 
adopt these hypotheses to test their reality in the sequel. These are 
demands that must be made upon experience. There is nothing slippery 
or elusive about these needs as Kant conceives them. 

Infinite progress demands, as its condition, the persistence of per- 
sonality, of individuality. Nothing but personal continuity can meet 
the moral demands for continuity of character. Thus immortality, while 
not susceptible of theoretical proof, "depends on an a priori law of 
unconditioned validity. It is inseparably bound up with the moral law. 1 
In the first Critique he had already indicated that teleological considera- 
tions required this postulate: "The proofs that may be serviceable for 
the world preserve their value undiminished; nay, they rather gain in 
clearness and unsophisticated conviction by the rejection of dogmatical 
assumptions. For reason is thus confirmed within her own proper 
province, namely the arrangement of ends, which nevertheless is at the 
same time an arrangement of nature." 2 

Freedom of the will must similarly be postulated for the moral life, 
for without it there could be no categorical ought. This is not the place 
to defend or criticize Kant's formal ethics in comparison with hedonism, 
energism, or any rival school. We are concerned only with his con- 
ception of the need and the verification of postulates. The moral law, 
commanding us to act from motives that are entirely independent of 
nature (as a mechanical order already developed under phenomenal 
conditions), must be a law of free beings. We are aware of the criticism 
that Kant moves here in a circle. He insists that the moral law pre- 
cludes the operation upon the will of anything but the moral law itself. 
All action proceeding from a motive seems to be action in which the will 
is determined by some natural (sensual) impulse. It would seem, 
therefore, that we must will the moral law without a motive. But Kant 
solves the dilemma by keeping clearly in mind a distinction between 
sensuous desires as motives and the single motive of "reverence for the 
moral law." 3 Kant is plainly forced to a pragmatic attitude in this 
matter of freedom and his break with mechanical causality bears close 
kinship with the spirit of James. Having specified two kinds of freedom 
— practical belonging to the phenomenal, and transcendental belonging 

1 Watson, Selections, p. 295. 

2 Critique of the Paralogisms, 2d ed., (Mahaffy), III, 288. 

3 Watson, Selections, p. 229. 



PRACTICAL REASON FOR THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 6 1 

to the intelligible world — he ascribes to man not the first only but also 
the second. Man has the u power of inaugurating a state of things by 
himself, a spontaneity which can of itself begin to act without the 
necessity of premising another cause." 1 This sounds like an expression 
of James's attitude: 

Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves 
and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of 
which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not 
take them at their face value ? Why may they not be the actual turning-places 
and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world — why not the workshop 
of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world 
grow in any other kind of way than this ? 2 

God must be postulated as a requisite for the moral life, for without 
such a supreme cause happiness and morality could not be harmonized ; 
the highest good would be incapable of realization. Reverting again to 
the first Critique: 

As we are bound by reason to conceive ourselves as belonging necessarily 
to such a world, though the senses present us with nothing but phenomena, we 
shall have to accept the other world as the result of our conduct in this world of 
sense (in which we see no such connection between goodness and happiness) 
and therefore as to us a future world. Hence it follows that God and a future 
life are two suppositions which, according to the principle of pure reason, 
cannot be separated from the obligation which that very reason imposes 
upon us. 3 

In pragmatic phraseology these ideas find their verification in their 
necessity for the ends which reason must assume for the realization of its 
highest ideals. But more particularly in the second Critique, God is the 
supremely good and omnipotent will that guarantees the realization of 
the highest good: "It is only in the ideal of the supreme original good 
that reason can find the ground of the practically necessary connection 
of the two elements of the highest derivative good (morality and its 
corresponding blessedness)." 4 

Probably no part of Kant's work comes nearer to the true pragmatic 
attitude than his treatment of these religious hypotheses. In regard to 
religion and ethics pragmatism seems in the role of working out thor- 
oughly Kant's problem of the relation of knowledge to faith and the 
significance of his saying, "I must remove knowledge to make room 
for faith," is being realized today by such religious thinkers' as Ritschl 

1 Critique of the Paralogisms, 2d ed., (Mahaffy), III, 371. 

2 Pragmatism, p. 287. 3 Mueller's trans., p. 651. 
4 Critique of the Paralogisms, III, 534. 



62 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

and Hermann as never before. We may not be able to find in Kant 
knowledge in all spheres reduced to something like faith — as has been 
charged to be the design of pragmatism — but in the sphere of religious 
conviction the parallel seems to be complete. It may appear that the 
mantle of Kant has fallen upon the pragmatist rather than upon the 
neo-Hegelians. Kant says explicitly: "It is absolutely needful that one 
be convinced of the existence of God; but it is not needful that one 
demonstrate it. What way of conviction is there apart from logical 
proof? That of the moral courage of conviction." 1 The marked 
similarity of this to the Ritschlian contention that religion is not derived 
from our knowledge of God, but rather from our human need which 
reaches out for a supply, need scarcely be emphasized. Kant practically 
"rests his case" for the proof of God on this great fact that the concept 
gives to the moral law a dynamic. He holds that the concept of God 
does not pertain to physics but to morals: "If a physicist takes refuge 
in God as the author of things, it is a confession that he has come to an 
end with his philosophy." 2 It is from the practical point of view that 
the concept of God has its great significance. It gives the human heart 
peace and security. The world of feeling cannot hold together without 
its dominant, unifying power. It is an emotional necessity. 

The close correspondence of Kant's conception of God with pragmatic 
thought may be traced in the debates, the cross-fire of question and 
answer that has been running through current philosophical journals. 
John E. Russel's reply to O. C. Quick in defense of pragmatism (which 
Russel confesses he long misunderstood) is almost a verbal paraphrase 
or expansion of Kant's words: "What content of truth is there left in his 
idea of God, when there has been subtracted from that idea all that 
connotes value for our human lives in the way of putting us into experi- 
entially good relations with God, such as trust, reverence, obedience, 
expectancy, satisfied wants ?" 3 Kant is explicitly emphatic in more than 
one place in disclaiming any objective reality of God to which our idea 
can correspond in any other way than that which signifies that these 
expressions stand for "concrete experiences of realized purposes, satisfied 
wants, sustained moral endeavors, comforted sorrows, harmonized 
discords in thoughts or feelings, and the peace of mind that comes when 
our total experiences are brought into unity." 4 It is not Kant, then, 
who has been short-circuited, but idealistic systems since Kant. It is 
just Kant's moral and religious attitude that is now being reproduced 

1 Hartenstein, Kant, II, 205. 3 Mind, XXXV, 548. 

2 Dialectic 7 (Paulsen, Kant, p. 288). 4 Ibid., p. 549. 



PRACTICAL REASON FOR THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 63 

and intensified in the conviction that life and action are deeper than 
logical processes, or rather that logical processes take their rise from 
these. Thought begins when life furnishes the data and there is nothing 
deeper in cognition than the fundamental needs, interests, and instincts 
of the mind or rather the life. " Religion does not originate in thought, 
but in what we experience." Kant freed practical faith from rational- 
ism, as he planned to do, and opened to religion a free field for develop- 
ment in life and action. Pragmatism follows his lead in giving to our 
moral and religious instincts right of way. The growing conviction 
among religious thinkers that their chief concern is not in creedal 
statements but in conduct and that religion finds its great test there, is 
in the direct line of Kant's influence. Value, need, endeavor — these are 
the words that ring the changes. There is scarcely anything farther 
from the truth than the feeling in some circles that the pragmatic 
attitude makes for irreverence toward "the eternal verities," however 
that phrase may be explained, or than the consequent disposition in the 
same circles to turn back to idealistic systems for a fancied support and 
refuge for waning orthodox standards of religious faith. It is pragmatism 
with its open door for belief and strenuous effort — effort encouraged by 
the conviction that our earnest lives count for something, change some- 
thing, really establish something; that the world is in the making and 
that part of that making is ours, that furnishes a true dynamic for moral 
and religious conduct. 

The one criticism upon Kant here is, again, that his distinction 
between matters of faith and understanding is too sharp, as it was in the 
contrast of sense and understanding. The separation is once more 
arbitrary and fictitious. Either knowledge will discredit belief or 
belief, verified in fact, in determining values, must ripen into knowledge. 
The two are mutually interactive, parts of one and the same process of 
adjustment and growth. Beliefs as postulates lead to knowledge and 
practically, therefore, amount to knowledge. They do not occupy a 
realm to themselves. To say that we take the problem of God out of 
the cognitive sphere and place it over in the region of voluntarism may 
serve certain purposes by way of contrast or emphasis, but it discredits 
the cognitive process too much and does just what the whole pragmatic 
movement inveighs against and sets itself to correct. So-called prag- 
matists have themselves fallen into this error. It is possible that Kant 
meant merely to shift the emphasis from a false intellectualism and 
certainly his position will tend to check not only absolutism but every 
form of crude materialistic intellectualism. 



6 4 

Granting that Kant's system seems to point in two directions — 
toward idealism on one side and toward pragmatism on the other — the 
idealists, the system-builders who took the first path, confidently 
re-creating and explaining the world in terms of thought until they 
reached the denial of the very starting-point of criticism, courageous- 
ly holding that "in the self-comprehension of the idea in the form 
of a concept the entire evolution of the world has reached its goal," 
should have noted the later date of the second Critique. The second 
path which leads away from any "logical autocracy," which regards the 
intellect as only one of the factors in the life-process, which clears the 
way for the categories of our volitional nature, would seem to hold a 
more direct lineage from Kant in the maturity of his thought. 



THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 

In Kant's contrast of things-in-themselves with appearances we have 
the climax of the contradiction between the transcendental and the 
functional and the most serious gap between him and modern prag- 
matism. It is hopeless to seek to eliminate the transcendental or even 
the transcendent from Kant's system without eliminating Kant himself. 
That Dinge an sich exist as the background of reality and the real cause 
of our sensations was undoubtedly his thought. Yet it is doubtful if, 
because of this fact, full justice has been done to the impetus which the 
Kantian movement gave to the modern functional conception of reality. 

Kant holds that all knowable reality, all objects dependable for 
verification, fall within experience. His own criticism of ontology 
would apply legitimately to his Dinge an sich, for in accordance with 
his whole examination of knowledge he would agree with the pragmatist 
in asking what really significant and verifiable meaning can things, 
objects, existences have if the pragmatic meaning is rejected ? As Kant 
would phrase it, if the categories cannot be applied to things-in- 
themselves, what meaning can they have? He never consciously and 
explicitly looked this question in the face in its positive aspect or he 
would have realized that true reality may be given in just this experience 
which he has labored to account for; that real objects as well as phe- 
nomenal exist only as they enter into our activity, our experience. 

Now it might conceivably be held, as Raub suggested, 1 that some 
pragmatists would not deny the existence of things-in-themselves and, 
in that case, there would be no break, for Kant teaches throughout that 
we do not, in our intellectual activity, deal with them at all, expect in a 
negative way. Such pragmatists would scarcely be advanced one whit 
beyond the great German. Kant was alive to the fact that the problem 
of knowledge, as he inherited it, involved two distinct questions — the 
possibility of a reference to reality lying beyond the experience of the 
one who knows and existing on its own account and, on the other hand, 
the nature of knowledge as an experience and the peculiar part played 
within it by the sensuous data and the governing principles of thought, 
respectively. We have assumed throughout this study that pragmatic 
standards necessitate the uniting of the two. 

1 Studies in Phil, and Psych. (Garman Memorial Volume), p. 214. 

65 



66 

To say, "Pragmatism does not deny their existence, but it does not 
discuss the question," 1 that we know nothing of ultimate realities and 
turn them over to metaphysics, is a cavalier dodge of real difficulties and 
would, of course, square up Kant immediately. Unfortunately, this 
does not suffice. Pragmatism, no more than Kant, can leave the 
metaphysical question alone. To place external reality as a " chaos" 
off by itself gets no farther than to leave it as an "unknown." Just as 
with Kant, so with such pragmatists one may ask: If the mind is 
incapable of judging as to the nature of external reality, on what grounds 
can such a "chaos" be posited? To turn over to metaphysics any 
residual question would seem to mean, if we analyze out the attitude 
expressed by the phrase, that there is, after all, some distinct, separate 
region of thought and existence, some sphere of ontology, beyond the 
range of our problems. But this would be to continue the false separa- 
tion of worlds against which the pragmatic movement has launched its 
whole force. It would be Kant's mistake implicitly repeated. As a 
pause in reading is as significant, for meaning, as the pronouncing and 
grouping of phrases, so in our systematic treatment of problems of 
philosophy a break or abrupt stopping-place, with the implication that 
we should go on if we could, would imply again an ultimate reality 
non-experiential. If Raub and those he represents mean simply that 
Kant and pragmatists alike have turned away from empty debates about 
the void where thinking ceases, very good, but we have moved no 
farther than we were. For pragmatists who " do not deny their existence 
but do not discuss the matter" no better statement could be asked than 
Kant's. Indeed his position has well been cited as fortifying an attitude 
of antipathy to pure intellectualism : 

The conception of a noumenon is not self-contradictory; for we cannot say 

that sense is the only possible mode of perception We give the name of 

noumena to all objects to which sensuous perception does not extend, just for 
the purpose of showing that such knowledge is not all that the understanding 
can think. Yet in the end we have to acknowledge that we cannot understand 
even the possibility of such noumena, and that the sphere of knowledge which 
we thus reserve beyond the sphere of phenomena is for us quite empty. In 
short, we have an understanding that problematically extends beyond the 
phenomenal, but no perception and not even the conception of a possible 
perception of objects beyond the sphere of sense, on which the understanding 

might be used assertorially If we choose to call it a noumenon, in order 

to show that we do not represent it as sensuous, we are at liberty to do so. But 

1 St-udies in Phil, and Psych. (Garman Memorial Volume), p. 214. 



THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 67 

as we cannot apply to it any one of the categories, the conception of it is for 
us quite empty and meaningless. 1 

Just to leave things-in- themselves alone, what more is needed than 
this? But, as Bergson remarks, if we know nothing of things-in- 
themselves, "How can we affirm their existence even as problematic? 
If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a sensuous 
manifold, capable of fitting into it exactly, is it not by that very fact 
in part known?" 2 

Again, as to our possible attitude toward these unwieldy things-in- 
themselves, opponents of pragmatism might defend the view that 
certain pragmatists — notably James — maintain at times a naive realism 
and that in this respect Kant has the advantage of them for an ultimate 
philosophical system. Such expressions in the pragmatist may, how- 
ever, justly be regarded as terminology inspired by their perfervid 
opposition to absolutism. The real connection of pragmatism at this 
point is probably to be found in its voluntaristic elements, the historical 
transmission of which may be taken as coming from Kant through 
Schopenhauer. As for realism and idealism, neither Kant nor the 
pragmatist need deny his obligation to the former for the working 
distinction between thing and idea nor to the latter for the conception of 
the dependence of our reality upon our thought. Pragmatism is only 
"a new name for old ways of thinking." The pragmatist would insist, 
however, that this dependence of reality upon our thought be under- 
stood in a voluntaristic sense. 

In the doctrine of a constructed experience we have the starting- 
point, at least, of a conception of reality which, while it has not been 
thoroughly elaborated, may justly be attributed in large measure to 
Kant's influence. The legitimate consequences of Kant's position 
would prevent his making any assertions — positive or negative — 
lending strength to either a realistic or absolutistic definition of reality. 
It may be proper to mention again that Kant disowned "idealism 
proper," regarding it as an "extravagant" doctrine. He held that we 
cannot determine reality by the understanding alone: 

The position of all true idealists, from the Eleatics down to Bishop Berkeley, 
is contained in the following statement: All knowledge acquired through the 
senses is a mere illusion, and the truth exists only in the ideas furnished by pure 
understanding and reason. The principle that governs and determines the 

1 Meiklejohn's trans., pp. 187, 206. 

2 Op. cit., p. 205. 



68 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

whole of my idealism is, on the contrary, that any knowledge of things that 
proceeds from pure understanding or reason is a mere illusion, and that truth 
is found in experience alone. 1 

In thus disclaiming the power of ideas to reach intuitively real being, as 
Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz held, and limiting them to a 
formal application, the function of merely providing the laws which 
connect phenomena and bring unity into the multiplicity of experience* 
he gives us a point of differentiation from absolute idealism and starts 
us on the road to pragmatism, at any rate. Caird was right in saying: 

The legitimate development of Criticism involves the final rejection of the 
thing-in-itself. How can anything come within consciousness which is essen- 
tially different from consciousness ? How can we think that which, ex hypo- 
thesis is unthinkable? How can thought discern its own absolute limits 
without emancipating itself from them ? How can it know the phenomenal as 
such, without a glimpse of the noumenon ? 2 

But the pragmatist would deny that it necessarily follows that we are 
" carried onward from transcendental to absolute idealism." 3 

The truth is that the problem of things-in-themselves is not Kant's 
real problem at all. It is a rationalistic heirloom which, for the com- 
parison of Kant with pragmatism or for any significant study, must be 
locked away in the " Museum of Curios." Yet to draw as near as 
possible to the real meaning of Kant as against the absolutist we may 
notice that his handling of matter or substance (formerly about synony- 
mous with the ultimate substrate) is more dynamic, even when we hold 
him to the literal word, than that of precedent absolutists like Spinoza 
or modern idealists like Hegel or Bradley. We have already seen his 
functional treatment of the ego or soul which Descartes made a part of 
real substance. When he comes to deal with matter in a scientific way 
he gives a dynamic theory of it. The laws of matter and motion cor- 
respond to the laws of thought established in his first Critique — laws of 
conservation, inertia, action and reaction, and continuity. 4 It seems 
highly significant that in dealing with substance he treats these not as 
laws of an absolute reality at all, of a material substance outside the 
mind, but merely as constant relations between phenomena in space 
and time. Here, too, the mind, by its forms and categories, constructs 
an objective world governed by its own laws. When we contrast this 

1 Prolegomena, p. 147. 

2 The Philosophy of Kant (one vol. work), p. 652. 

3 Ibid. 

4 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Wissenschaft, III, "Mechanics." 



THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 69 

treatment of substance itself with that of the metaphysicians of his day 
we seem to get means of differentiation that, afford food for thought as 
indicating in what direction Kant is pointing, if we are seeking to under- 
stand the real spirit of his philosophy. 

Kant and the pragmatist agree that the only reality we can definitely 
know is a reality either given in or constructed in experience. Prag- 
matism, of course, is not committed to saying that we know reality at 
all, but rather that our knowledge is one of the functions in reality. 
Knowledge is not a process of referring to something external. It is 
a process going on within the object. And we have been seeking to 
emphasize the significant fact that, in contradistinction from the ration- 
alists who made light of experience as confused knowledge, or as mere 
appearance, to use Bradley's phrase, Kant is really concerned to prove 
just the reality of the world as it appears to us. His point of view is 
that of science, seeking to establish the validity of our knowledge of 
phenomena. 

In connection with this is the further fact, also pregnant with 
pragmatic meaning, that he rejects the overemphasis upon pure intel- 
lectualism that had been current since the dawn of the Renaissance. 
In contending for the worth of man as determined more by his will than 
by the understanding, he foreshadowed the attitude of the pragmatist 
and suggested hints, not elaborated to be sure, of the real dynamic 
character of reality. It was from him that Schopenhauer took his 
interpretation of the relations between Dinge an sich and phenomena 
which is approached by the viewpoint of such thinkers as Schiller. 

It was notably Fichte who showed that things-in-themselves are 
really inconsistent with Kant's presuppositions. In comment upon 
Fichte's attitude Jacobi declared that we cannot enter Kant's system 
without things-in-themselves and we cannot remain in it if we retain 
them. The latter remarked with pungent wit that Kant's thing-in- 
itself "as in itself real, but unknown and unknowable by us enjoys a 
position of otium cum dignitate^ 1 We may add that it is little better 
than non-existence. Once more Kant remarks: "The transcendental 
object, which may be the ground of this appearance which we call 
matter is a mere somewhat, and we could not understand what it is 
even if someone could tell us." 2 Kant would seem to agree with 
Fullerton, that "The only external world about which it can be profitable 
to talk at all is an external world revealed in experience." 3 Pragmatism 

1 Werke, III, 74. 

2 Meiklejohn's trans., p. 380. 3 Mind, XXXIV, 380. 



70 PRAGMATIC ELEMENTS IN KANT'S PHILOSOPHY 

scarcely goes farther than to assume that an external world about which 
it is not profitable even to talk does not exist for any inquiry or interest. 

How shall we, on Kant's own principles, pass from ideas to things- 
in-themselves ? Kant assumes that the latter affect us and that sensa- 
tions as effects point back to ultimate things as causes. But he has 
himself made this impossible by granting to the law of causality only 
empirical validity. Absolute phenomenalism, rather than absolute 
idealism, would be a truer inference from his system if we must be 
pushed on to absolutism of any sort. As Raub says, "In the final 
analysis the phenomena are really noumena. Truth with Kant as with 
the pragmatist is necessarily a relation between different parts of experi- 
ence." 1 Our world of ideas constitutes our only reality. But this does 
not involve Berkeleyan idealism or any other kind necessarily. It 
remained for pragmatism to clear up some of the obscurity in this word 
ideas, combining with it, as did Schopenhauer, the significance of the 
end-striving or volitional aspects of our mental life. Ideas are not 
entities with an existence of their own. There are no such things as 
pure mental states. Ideas are a part of the practical life-process, or in 
other words of developing reality itself. The meaning of ideas is to be 
sought in the conditions, actual or prospective, of our struggle to live 
and develop. Similarly our judgments arise from activity and are true 
if they work for the attainment or the alteration of experienced values. 
"The truth of a state of mind means the function of a leading that is 
worth while." This is what ideas, thinking, are for. Consequently no 
object may properly be said to exist except as it enters or may enter into 
our experience for good or ill. 

Pragmatism shows that our knowledge is not, to use Kant's own 
unfortunate illustration, like an island standing in a boundless and 
impenetrable ocean of reality, from which it is forever shut off by a mist 
or fog. Our ever-growing experience and our experienced relations with 
other beings are reality itself. The real is just what we experience it as 
in our absorption and assimilation of it as our knowledge and life expand. 
Schiller holds, as did Kant, that we help make the outer world known to 
us. Do we also make or alter therewith a reality independent of our 
knowing? Not independent, the pragmatist would answer. We do 
alter the world. The outer world, whatever that expression may con- 
tain, is no more unrelated to us, generally speaking, than is a refreshing 
summer shower unrelated to the parched vegetation and the suffering 
humanity to whose relief it comes. Indeed has it not been seriously held 

r Op. tit., p. 215. 



THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 7 1 

that the restoration of our northern forests might help to bring back and 
multiply the refreshing showers by the very establishment of need on 
our side ? Both terms of the relation or of the related experience are 
altered. Thinking is a mode of interacting. We, after knowing, 
influence the course of the world in other ways than we would have done 
without our knowledge. The known object is changed by the fact of its 
being known. It passes by that fact into new relations with other 
objects. It was one of Kant's great services to show that knowing is 
not a mere process of revealing objects but rather an act in which we 
think about them, reflect upon them, and consequently an act partly 
constitutive and determinative of their character as objects. We 
cannot speak of independent reality that is merely discovered by our 
knowledge. Knowing is not an intellectual abstraction but a "prelude 
to doing." Schiller says the marmots reveal themselves by their anxious 
whistling before they are as yet really known to the Alpine intruder. 
They fear being known because this is merely a phase in the course of 
action that may involve death to them. Even so-called inanimate 
objects are subject to the same criterion. The awareness of a stone 
consists in, and is brought about by, its capacity for use in human 
construction. "To use and to be used includes to know and to be 
known." 1 

Kant's inherited presuppositions led him to retain a supposed 
separation of object and ideas, of experience as we have it and reality 
itself. He retained this separation as an empty form back in his thought, 
much as people who have outgrown their religious creeds retain them in 
an isolated region of their minds, if we may be allowed so faulty an 
expression. Technically, with Kant, thought remains a merely sub- 
jective principle whose function is exhausted in bringing order and unity 
into consciousness — order and unity assumed without a standard. 
Ideas are restricted to phenomena. Technically, such an experience as 
this affords would not be real experience at all, but a matter of mere 
representations. But the spirit of Kant's philosophy goes beyond this 
separation. It is through the interpretation, criticism, and completion 
of his doctrine that we have come to see the true nature of experience, 
the true function of ideas as that of connecting mind with objects. We 
do not have a subject here and an object there, the mind on one side and 
things on the other. Experience is a real thing itself, a concrete expres- 
sion of reality, in which subject and object play their organic parts. In 
the language of J. E. Creighton: 

1 Studies in Humanism, p. 443. 



72 

Not only is there no object without a subject, but it is equally true that 
there is no subject without an object. There is no independent object outside 
of thought, and there is no thought-in-itself standing apart and in abstraction 
from the contents of experience and entering into only occasional relations to 
this content. We do not have first a mind and then become conscious of our 
relations to objects, but to have a mind is just to stand in those self-conscious 
relations to the objective realities P 1 

We can readily understand how hard it was for Kant to break away 
from this dualism when we see not only the representational theory of 
knowledge that goes with crude realism but also the interaction view of 
mind in modern psychology harboring the same conception of a "con- 
sciousness thing, shut up within itself, and related to other independently 
existing things." Even the theory of parallelism in psychology, while 
seeking to avoid metaphysical difficulties, still treasures unconsciously 
the view of two separate entities. Pragmatism, while not claiming 
absolute novelty in this respect, has done good service in revising all 
philosophical presuppositions regarding the functions of subject and 
object in experience. And it is just one of Kant's permanent contri- 
butions to have shown that subject and object develop from within 
experience itself. His failure to give to experience the extensive range 
which properly belongs to it as embracing reality in itself does not lessen 
the value of this contribution, for it is evident that the experience which 
he really treasured in his deepest meaning is the same experience which 
modern pragmatism accepts, not merely as phenomenal, but as reality 
itself. Kant's real center of gravity falls, as does that of the pragmatist, 
within the mind's activity, or better, within the activity of social indi- 
viduals, with objects entering as real and constitutive elements into 
its nature. 

Pragmatism is indebted in some measure, as has been said, to 
Schopenhauer, whose voluntaristic terminology strove at least to 
separate freedom, causality, and the unity of all life from rationalistic 
or intellectualistic ingredients — to recognize purposive factors in our 
mental life. Pragmatists are even more averse than was he to the 
Hegelian use of ideas, as the wrong line of development from Kant, to 
evolve and perfect his true meaning. Pragmatism accepts voluntarism, 
but combines it with empiricism, with a true scientific attitude. This 
is not the old materialistic empiricism which in its way was as dogmatic 
as rationalism, for pragmatism recognizes no real bodies as fixed data 
any more than it accepts categories forged and " fulminated before nature 
began." Pragmatism constantly introduces the criteria of values. 
Indeed all existential judgments are subjected by its method to this 

1 Philosophical Review, XII, 600. 



THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 73 

touchstone and become in the end judgments of value. It is in bridging 
the gap between Kant and empiricism that one of the chief services of 
pragmatism is to consist. Empiricism has always labored hard over 
Kant's position and has never been able to concede that the outer world 
is not found by and taken up into our consciousness fixed and given, but 
is partly created by our apparatus of perception. Empiricism has 
fostered the illusion of the tabula rasa. It has failed to do justice to the 
activity of the organism in the act of knowing, to the fact that we do 
not merely receive and record but that we react in modes decided by our 
own nature and directed toward the accomplishment of our own ends or 
ideals. It was this fault that led Kant to abandon the attitude of 
empiricism which for a time he had espoused, and to look for its cor- 
rective. In swinging too far toward the other pole he was unable to 
appreciate the dynamic and changing character of the mind's reaction 
and the fact that it reacts as one whole. The functional view of mind 
and reality dissolves the parallelism or dualism that prevailed a quarter 
of a century ago, but not by again assuming a fixed datum to which all 
else must adjust itself and leaving unsolved the old question of how this 
can be related to mind. Pragmatism essays the interpretation of reality 
in terms of the whole circle of human needs and ideals. It is Dewey's 
reflex-arc concept again, carried out to its completest application. To 
do this, it insists, we need not have resort to absolute idealism with its 
speculative entities. 

Pragmatism would turn to social psychology for an attempt to define 
reality, if reality must be defined. Our ideas are social products, our 
recognized realities are social achievements and they are just what they 
are to the social consciousness. This does not remove or restrict any of 
the implications that are secured by other philosophic creeds or systems. 
Some are concerned about such portions of reality as do not come 
within immediate experience-prehistoric events, whorls of star dust, 
molten rock a thousand years ago. What about the whole of reality 
and how about knowing reality completely ? The postulates of immedi- 
ate experience do not exclude reality that transcends individual human 
consciousness. They simply correlate reality with the consciousness of 
humanity in all its scope and possibilities. To those who clamor for a 
still more transcendent reality pragmatism stands with its unconquered 
challenge — What other meaning has reality than that which is revealed 
in social consciousness ? And this challenge is not only compatible with 
the essence of Kant's work, but, as we have seen, is almost a liberal 
paraphrase of his own terminology. 



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